


Landlessness

by hannah_baker



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Future Fic, Internet Boyfriends, M/M, depression and anxiety, non-hockey au, quarter life crisis, tiny houses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-13 04:41:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 65,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15356469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hannah_baker/pseuds/hannah_baker
Summary: Twenty-four-year-old Connor McDavid only has Ahabian obsessions. He can't love casually — he can only let his interests eclipse him. The night he loses his job he catches a TV show on tiny houses, which sparks a new fixation. House building plans, thousands of dollars, and his own YouTube channel later and he's past the point of no-return. He's building a house on wheels.Dylan Strome is floundering in his depression, only making decisions that make it worse, like seeking out YouTube videos with zeroes for their viewcount, letting the loneliness of unwatched videos wash over him — until he finds Connor. It was just a little cell phone video of him sitting on the trailer he bought that morning to build a house on. Connor's passion is magnetic, but even the thought of a tiny house makes Dylan's chest constrict. He can't think of a more effective way to give himself a panic attack than being in a house that's only 160 square feet.They fall for each other while Connor is trying to find meaning in the flexibility of a tiny life, and Dylan is struggling for security as his safety nets get pulled from under him. Their only common goal is their love for each other.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have so many things to say about this. I wrote this novel-length story two years ago (if you can tell from all of the fitbit references) but never posted it. It's complete at 67k, and I hope to get it all up in about two weeks. 
> 
> The most important thing to note is that Connor and Dylan's families have been completely altered to suit my story. Connor has a single mom, Dylan only has an older brother, his parents have incorrect names. I made up Ryan's wife and family completely. If you're the kind of person who picks up details about character from other fics, disregard this one. It is devoid of facts. 
> 
> Still, I hope you enjoy it. I wrote it during my own quarter-life crisis. Dylan in this story is very, very close to me. Maybe more than any other character I've ever written. Maybe I needed distance from it before I could post it. Who knows. 
> 
> The advice is "write the story you want to read," and this one is mine, 100%.

Connor was exhausted. It was already past midnight on a Tuesday night, and he’d been cooking for almost ten hours. He had a bandana wrapped around his forehead, blonde hair sticking out the top, to keep his sweat out of their customers’ food. His co-workers slumped around him, kitchen staff and front of the house. There was still the employee meal to dish up, but everyone did that for themselves, a rich beef stew that the head chef was still testing out. Everyone ladled it out for themselves, the chunks of potatoes and carrots that Connor had cut up himself.

 

This part of the night was the wind-down part when customers had left for good, and Connor had the relief of knowing that they didn’t have any more orders coming into the kitchen.

 

Christopher, the owner, came into the kitchen that night. Connor wasn’t surprised to see him. The restaurant, Chez Chris, was a small operation that served very Americanized French food. Christopher was around a lot, overseeing, and generally loudly worrying without really doing anything himself. That’s just how management worked, as far as Connor could tell.

 

Connor and the rest of the employees milled about the kitchen, chatting and trying to forget how slow their night was, but how much work they had to put in anyway. Cooking was not fulfilling to Connor. It was just the job that he’d fallen into in college and the job that he continued after. He had kitchen experience. That’s who offered him jobs.

 

“Hey team, I’ve got some news for you,” Christopher said, and everyone quieted themselves down to the clanking of their spoons against their bowls. Connor could taste the salt. Always too much salt at Chez Chris. Connor assumed that he was going to announce that they had a new manager or assistant manager. That seemed to be the regular announcement. “If you’ve been paying close attention lately, you won’t be surprised by what I have to tell you. Chez Chris is closing. Tonight.

 

There was an indignant gasp through the group of people in the kitchen. Some of his co-workers had kids. They were always going on about how little they made there. Wages had never been a big deal to Connor. The bed that he went home to sleep in was in his mom’s basement, in the room he’d slept almost every night of his life in. He didn’t have like, real expenses. He just saved his paychecks. Paid his student loans. Ate his mom’s food, or ate at the restaurant.

 

“I’m sorry to spring it on you guys. The end date, as dictated by the investors, had been up in the air. Our terrible night tonight sealed the deal. I want to thank you all for the hard work that you’ve put into your jobs. I’d love to offer you all a glowing professional recommendation as you move on to new opportunities in your careers.

 

“This is bullshit,” Billy, the sous chef said next to him. He had at least one kid.

 

Connor wanted to just slip out and leave. He took his bowl and spoon and slipped out the back door to his car. He’d pocketed his wallet and keys before the meal, knowing that he’d stay for the shortest possible period of time.

 

The alleyway behind the restaurant was quiet. He could hear the commotion from the kitchen through the door that he let close behind him. There was yelling. Connor's first instinct upon hearing about the restaurant closing wasn’t disappointment or fear. It was closer to elation, to the feeling of freedom. He didn’t have anything to do or anywhere to go the next day. It had been a long time since that feeling. He’d been working six or seven day weeks for nearly a year, trying to keep that restaurant afloat, taking the overtime when offered. Connor always took overtime.

 

He had a hefty bank account and a shameful and pathetic lack of responsibility.

 

He got in his car, his hand cradled under his bowl, the stew warm on the chilly spring evening. It had only been a matter of weeks since the snow had melted for good. He sat in his car and finished his food, scraping the last of the thick stew from the bottom of the bowl before balancing it in the cavernous center console of his truck.

 

Part of him wanted to say a proper, real goodbye to his coworkers. They were all still inside the kitchen, except one of the bus boys who had split shortly after him, his car taking off from the staff section of the parking lot so quickly his tires screeched.

 

Yeah, that’s how Connor was going to leave too. He put his car in drive and took off. Maybe it would be his last restaurant job. Lord knew he didn’t want to get another.

 

He wasn’t sure he wanted another job in general.

 

He came home from the restaurant smelling like grease, took a shower in the tiny basement bathroom that he got to himself, and flopped onto the couch in the basement

 

The walls of his mom’s basement were as familiar as his own skin by this point in time, and he fell asleep knowing that something was missing. It thrummed loud in his heart, this emptiness. Three years of working a shitty restaurant job and living with his mom had separated him from his social group. His friends now had regular nine-to-fives, jobs that paid down payments on houses, jobs that paid for weddings and babies. Connor couldn’t log into Facebook without seeing another one of his friends getting engaged, getting married, getting pregnant. He was jealous of those getting puppies for fucks sake. There wasn’t much for him to boast about in his own life online. What was he supposed to post now? _Hey guess what everyone, my restaurant went under, and I’m gainfully unemployed?_

 

He spun the remote in his hand, took a swig of his beer. He changed from channel to channel, the news telling him that the Leafs lost again, that it would likely snow ten inches the next day. Both things were givens. It was March, his twenty-fourth birthday already in his rearview mirror, and when he flipped the television channel to a home improvement show about someone building what was called a “tiny house,” Connor was intrigued. He ran his hands through his short-cropped blonde hair, still damp from his shower, took another sip of his beer, and listened to a couple talk about how they were over having a mortgage, and with a little over thirty grand, they could build this tiny house that they would only have to pay operating costs on - which would be minimal considering the small space. 

 

Connor didn’t think that that small of a space was practical. But he watched through the end of the episode, and then on to another one, a nighttime marathon of tiny house stories, each one different, but each the same. These people wanted to do something other than work to pay their mortgages or their rent. 

 

At the end of the marathon, which at some point he pulled up on his computer so he could watch in bed, he called his brother. The sun was starting to come up.

 

“I’m at work, is this an emergency?” Cam said over the phone. Cam had gotten a sensible degree in finance, and proceeded to land a job after college that meant that five years after graduation he had his own office and wore designer suits to work. Connor didn’t want that. He didn’t want to show up to work in a designer suit. It was seven in the morning, and Connor hadn't gone to bed yet, his hair messy, just his shoulders peaking out of his comforter. He hadn’t spoken a single word since the kitchen the night before, and his voice croaked as he tried to say what he wanted to say. 

 

“Have you ever built anything before?” 

 

“Yeah, like, plenty of Ikea furniture,” Cam said. Connor could hear the clack of keys in the background and knew he didn’t have Cam’s full attention. 

 

“You’ve never like, used a circular saw, have you?” Connor anticipated this taking a lot of time on the circular saw. 

 

“Are you in trouble?” Cam asked, the keyboard going quiet. “You’re not in the hospital, are you?” 

 

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m at home, don’t worry.” 

 

“Why are you calling me now?” 

 

“I lost my job last night.” 

 

“You got fired?” 

 

“The restaurant closed.” 

 

“Shit. Sounds like it was coming though.” 

 

“Sort of. I’m sort of happy about it though. I don’t ever have to go back," Connor said, never meaning anything more in his entire life. 

 

“Yeah, but when you showed up, they gave you money for it though.” 

 

“Exactly!” Connor shouted. “If money is the only reason that I show up to work, something is wrong, right?”

 

“Need money to live, baby bro.” 

 

“What if I could have a place that doesn’t cost me anything after the initial build? A place I don’t have to pay rent on or a mortgage.” Cam had a mortgage. Cam had a nice job and a golden retriever. If Connor didn’t love him so much, he’d hate him. 

 

“You want to live in a shed or something?”

 

“Or something. Have you heard of tiny houses?” 

 

“Oh my god, my hipster little brother.” 

 

“What?”

 

“You majored in history and French, got and lost a shitty job, and now you want to build a tiny house.” 

 

“It’ll be the best decision I’ve ever made,” Connor declared. 

 

“You need the money to actually build it though. How much does that cost?”

 

“Just over thirty grand, about.” 

 

“And you have that?”

 

“I have that. About.” 

 

“About?” 

 

“I’ve got twenty-eight,” Connor said. 

 

“How do you have twenty-eight thousand dollars?”

 

“I live at home and buy nothing.” 

 

“Ah, yes. The best savings plan. Having Mom give you the eyebrow every time you walk in the door with a shopping bag, or get a package in the mail.”

 

“It’s been effective.” 

 

“Does this include buying all the tools you’re going to need?”

 

“Toronto tool library,” Connor said. “I can borrow them.” 

 

“And building plans?”

 

“There are about a thousand websites dedicated to helping you figure your tiny house shit out.” 

 

“And timeline?”

 

“This summer.” 

 

“All before you got out of bed this morning?” 

 

“How do you know I’m still in bed?”

 

“I lived with you for most of our lives, kid. I know you.” 

 

“Fair.” Connor paused. “So, my plan?” 

 

“I think you’re an idiot.” 

 

“Will you help me build it?”

 

“You have enough for a down payment for a house, Con.” 

 

“But I don’t have enough to pay a mortgage every month.” 

 

“Do I get to use that circular saw?” 

 

“To your heart’s content.” 

 

“Alright loser. Sign me up.” 

 

\--

 

Across the GTA, Dylan Strome was counting down the hours until his weekend. Not that he had plans. He’d see some friends for brunch or drinks, but it was hard to be around his friends at the moment. Mike had just gotten a promotion, and Brian was making so much money that he bought a new car. Dylan was hanging on, working a temp job that he really couldn’t stand in order to pay rent on an apartment he shared with a guy he met through craigslist. Things could be going better.

 

“Strome, I need you to complete the research for Amy before you leave today,” his boss said, casually passing by his desk. He had a spreadsheet open on his desktop that he was filtering and sorting through, trying to find a particular data pattern. He was almost asleep. If he focused, he would only have to stay a little late.

 

He skipped his afternoon break, shoving a granola bar into his mouth as he approached the time he usually left and ate dinner, and finally shut his computer off, standing up from the haze of spreadsheets in time to see that the office around him was empty, every short cube housing a sleeping computer and a slightly broken desk chair. 

 

The later train was less crowded, and as he waked from the stop back to his apartment, he tried to walk off the week of sitting in a button-up shirt and dress slacks. 

 

When he got home, he changed into sweats while a microwave meal was heating up. His roommate was nowhere to be found, but his roommate worked retail and had an unpredictable schedule. He checked the whiteboard calendar, and sure enough, he worked until close. 

 

Dylan got comfortable on the couch, fork sticking out of his mouth as he opened his computer and brought up YouTube. He’d gone through phases on youtube. He’d watched popular vloggers. He’d watched recommended funny videos. He’d spent a month watching an alarming number of ASMR videos. Now his thing was The Lonely Internet - videos that no one had watched. Videos that sadly declared “No Views.” Videos that had no audience. 

He opened a random number generator in a second tab and used it to fill in the YouTube search bar. It came up with a lot of junk that he had to sort through. Home listings and cars for sale, videos that had thousands of views, and ones that had hundreds. On the fourth page, there was a thirty-second long video called “babycakes” which was a domestic collection of seconds that highlighted a baby’s first birthday, baby and highchair already covered in chocolate cake, voices in the background encouraging her to shove more cake into her face. Another fifteen or so minutes of searching lead him to a middle age woman talking into her laptop camera to a woman named Diane about their kitchen renovation and how their aging cat now had to have diabetes shots twice a day. 

 

It was videos like that that really got Dylan. It was an intimate rush of looking into the window of someone’s living room, or reading someone’s diary. Too much of this was draining. It was emotional work to bear witness to the moments in a person’s life that had been sent into the void, videos uploaded with the naive assumption that every video on YouTube got watched. These videos had been sent into the void, and Dylan was there to pull them back.

 

It wasn’t noble work. It was quiet work, where Dylan felt seen because he was able to see others. It made him want to send videos into The Lonely Internet, but he couldn’t stand to. He didn’t actually want his videos to go unwatched. If he was going to do that, he wanted an audience. It sounded unbearable to him to put effort into something and then send it into a black hole. Finding and watching these videos was about pulling them out of the void. 

 

So instead he fell asleep on his couch, TV on nothing in particular in the background, laptop warming his stomach. He woke when Drew got home and he extricated himself from the couch, threw out his microwave meal, washed his fork, and went to bed. It was just how he spent his Fridays now. In college, he would have gone out, gotten drunk, maybe caused some trouble. But the people he used to get drunk with seemed so far away from him now. He used to have everything in common with them. Now relating to them took an undue amount of effort. Plus, he was tired. He was so, so tired.   


\--

 

Every good house starts with a good plan. 

 

Connor figured out quickly why so many tiny houses that he saw were built on trailers: building codes wouldn’t let you build a permanent structure that small. If you put it on wheels however, it became a temporary structure, and therefore did not need to conform to the same standards as regular permanent structures. There was secondary appeal to that too: Connor could haul it around behind his pickup, could take it anywhere with him. If he got a job in Vancouver, he could drive his house there, and set up camp in campgrounds, with water hookups and everything. Or he could drive it out into the middle of nowhere, solar panels on the roof, and be self-sufficient. 

 

He did his research at the same desk he did his homework at in high school, Leafs and Blue Jays stickers half peeled off of the front of the drawers. He could get a little fold-down table to use as a desk or a place to eat for his house. He scanned the surface of his desk. He’d accumulated a lifetime worth of trinkets that scattered across every flat surface of his room. He had bowling trophies from elementary, he had a closet full of clothes that he only wore about five percent of. No tiny house was exactly resplendent with closet space. Connor knew that.

 

It was part of the appeal, stripping his possessions down to what he actually needed, what he used, and what mattered to him. He’d never given the collection of things that filled his shelves and drawers much thought. He bought things knowing he had the space for everything, and he held onto things past when they were useful or meaningful. 

 

There were preliminary house designs that he could download for free — designs that other builders shared because they loved the tiny house movement, and wanted others to have access. Because part of the tiny house ideology was about financial freedom — the cornerstone of the reason Connor was so interested. He had plans open on his computer, a little 160 square foot darling on wheels, all of the specifications laid out for him. But his eyes tracked away from it, and up to a shelf with a bunch of sentimental crap on it. 

 

He signed, ran a hand through his hair, and headed up stairs. 

 

His mom, responsible employed citizen as she was, was absent, at work at the hospital where she was a nurse. It was nice living on an opposite schedule as your parent if you had to live with them. Like any good roommate relationship, an appropriate amount of space let you properly grow to miss them. Plus, if Connor had to see her across the breakfast table every morning, he’d probably snap. As much as he loved her, he was an adult. He needed his own space. 

 

He grabbed a glass of water and a few garbage bags, and headed back downstairs. 

 

He started in on his closet. It was silly, but he tossed his useless old clothes, things that didn’t fit over his now broad shoulders anymore, pajama pants with holes in the butt, pants that were too short for him, right over his shoulder into the corner of his room. If he hadn’t worn something in six months, he got rid of it. He had soccer cleats under a pile of warmup pants that looked like they would fit a twelve year old. He found a legitimate clip-on tie. 

 

It all went in the pile in the corner. 

 

He was left with just the clothes that he actively thought of as “his wardrobe.” It looked...small. 

 

The smile that broke out on his face felt earned. 

 

He quickly dug through the pile in the corner and sorted the clothes into two categories: throw and donate. He brought the throw bags upstairs to put into the bin in the garage, and dumped the donate bags into the cab of his truck. He’d take them...somewhere...later. 

 

He could do this. His clothes could fit into a few drawers. It’s not like he had thirty years of Christmas decorations or anything to store. Not that he was going to start side-eyeing his mom for her Christmas village collection that took up half of their basement storage space, but it was something that wasn’t on his priority list. 

 

He got back to the plans. He looked at supply lists, budgets, blogs. He watched YouTube videos. He watched literal hours of YouTube videos.

 

The quality on most of the videos wasn’t great. There was no camera or lighting crew. Shots were shaky at best. 

 

Connor could do this, too. He was feeling, in that moment, like he could do anything. He could document the whole thing. He wasn’t after YouTube fame. None of these videos got more than a couple hundred views or anything. But he wanted a project, and he was not one to ever make anything easy on himself. He set up his phone on an eye-level shelf on his desk, and hit record.   


 

\--

Dylan regretted many of his life choices, but most of his regrets weren't a choice. He regretted the part of his life that was him: a white man raised by upper-middle-class parents, becoming friends with other white men raised in upper-middle-class families. 

 

Mostly because he was a bitter, jealous, asshole. 

 

He didn’t want to be this way. He wanted to be kind and generous, happy for his friends while being appreciative of the privilege his upbringing granted him. But c’mon, when one of your twenty-four-year-old friends tells you that he’s starting a tech start-up for something about video file storage, it was hard for him to not roll his eyes and reluctantly go out for celebration drinks. 

Michael was one of his buddies from high school, who went to college for computer science. He made a bunch of computer science friends, and they built apps that did basically nothing in their spare time, but even that was impressive to Dylan, who did literally nothing in his spare time. 

 

“I’m just lucky to have the hookups with some venture capitalists,” Michael said over drinks in the back booth of a bar in downtown Toronto. They got bottle service. Dylan was very glad Michael was paying for everything. 

 

“Yeah, man. That’s awesome,” Dylan said, trying hard to sound like he was happy and excited for his friend. He imagined this is what it must feel like to be a woman, and have another one of your best friends telling you that she’s marrying the love of her life, while you’re sitting at home with Netflix and your cat. Dylan didn’t even have a cat. 

 

“It’s so freeing to imagine that the office we work in is going to be totally controlled by us. We want freedom and openness, you know? Like, why is it so important to wear a shirt and tie to work every day? Our dress code is going to be ‘show up clean.’ I’m so excited.” 

 

“Show up clean. Yeah,” Dylan forced a laugh. He was drinking a shitty Bud Light that he was sure was probably costing Michael ten bucks. It was a good reminder that he needed to wash some work shirts or be at risk of showing up to his own job not clean. Not like he’d never just ironed a dirty shirt before. He was a temp. If they expected perfection out of him, they could hire him and give him full benefits.

 

“And the idea, I mean, all tech startups have to have a killer idea. But like ours is about personal video networking. Not everyone wants to upload everything they have onto YouTube for the world to see. So it’s like a video social network, but it’s not just six seconds. It’s meant for people who are more invested in privacy than internet fame. People sharing videos of their babies, or sending their moms tours of their dorm rooms. But those videos no longer have to be stored on their phone storage…”

 

Dylan didn’t think it was that unique of an idea personally — like if you want your video to be private, just text it — but whatever. It made him think about all of the personal videos he’d found himself, and about how Michael’s tech startup idea would kill that section of the internet. Or at least help it die. 

 

“The most important thing,” Michael told him, getting a little tactile as he had yet another drink and leaning heavily into Dylan’s side. “Is that I feel like I’m doing such important work. This is really going to help people, and enrich their lives.” 

 

Dylan thought about his own job, and how profit focused his company was. Sure, they were helping people. But they were helping rich people stay rich, and get richer. Not exactly the most rewarding work. 

 

Around the booth, he listened as his other friends talked about their jobs, their girlfriends, the general successes of their lives. He knew that people pulled out the highlight reels for moments like this. No one was talking about how they defaulted on their credit cards, or got pulled over for drinking and driving. Dylan knew that. He casually mentioned that his brother was expecting their second baby, and that he was super excited to be an uncle to another little girl. It wasn’t even his accomplishment, his life moment. 

 

He knew it wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to think that all of his friends were dealing with their own struggles, but his imagination wasn’t good enough to make him feel better. Maybe Kurt and his girlfriend were having huge problems that they thought having a baby would solve. Maybe Ted hated his shitty job as much as Dylan hated his. But they could all make their lives sound perfect. And Dylan couldn’t do that with his own. He just didn’t know how to.

 

\--

 

 

"I don't know why you hang out with them," Mitch said. Dylan had known Mitch Marner since roughly their respective births. Mitch was a genuinely eccentric (and obnoxious) person. And Dylan’s best friend. They were sitting in his overgrown backyard, on chairs that were new in the 70's, and had only been collecting dirt since then. He'd made them "patio drinks," which apparently meant a lot of rum. They were literally drinking them out of tiki glasses.

 

"Because I've been friends with them forever."

 

"I swear, every time you hang out with them, especially in a large group, we have to have this like, therapy recovery session." He kicked his feet up into Dylan's lap, and Dylan rested a hand on Mitch’s ankle. Mitch had been the only person in high school who Dylan had been friends with who had unashamedly never wanted to follow the usual suburban "path to success." Dylan had always been more jealous of him for not going to college than he was of his other friends getting progressively shittier and shittier office jobs.

 

Mitch's rented house loomed large behind them, ivy climbing up the side of it. There were plants growing in the fire pit. Everything looked a little forgotten about inside and out, but only because the people who lived there — Mitch and his roommates — had lives of their own. They had goals outside of "keep their house looking socially acceptable." They had a garden and a compost, but the garden only grew food, and the compost was so serious that it would melt the snow off it in the winter.

 

"Marns, just because you've always been good at finding your people doesn't mean that everyone is so good at it. It's hard to make friends."

 

"It's pretty easy to unmake them though, just saying."

 

"You just want to watch the world burn."

 

"Pretty much. I mean, I just want you to spend your time with people who don't make you miserable." Mitch had been part of that friend group too. Only he'd separated himself from almost everyone after high school. He'd never made a Facebook account, so everyone's excuse was that he was "so hard to get in touch with." Dylan always found that he texted back more quickly than any of the others.

 

"I don't want to go to work tomorrow, speaking of things that make me miserable."

 

"There's a job for you stocking grocery store shelves with me if you want it. Middle of the night. You don't have to talk to anyone. You'd get lots of steps logged on your fitbit. Your mom would be impressed."

 

"I'm actually not sure if she'd be impressed with my steps or disappointed that I quit a job with a billion dollar company in order to stock shelves."

 

"Stop getting hung up on the “prestige” of your dumb temp job. It’s not like they’re paying _you_ a billion dollars. Some people are being obnoxious about how well they're doing out there. They spout off about their accomplishments because they don’t have any self esteem. The rest of us are just surviving and enjoying their lives more than them." Dylan thought that Marns’ technique for happiness was to just assume that he was happier than everyone else. Dylan couldn't get into that mindset. Stocking grocery store shelves in the middle of the night sounded awful to him. He was pretty sure that Mitch still drove a car from the eighties. He wanted…well he wasn't sure if 'more' was the right phrase.

 

He wanted different. He didn't know what he wanted.

 

“C’mon kiddo,” he said getting out of his dirty chair. His clothes were a missmatched jumble of colors. No dirt every showed on them. It was just the very beginning of spring, cold enough to still wear a coat outside. He had gloves on holding his tiki drink. “Lemme make you some mac and cheese, and we can watch Netflix. And you can stop complaining.”

 

\--

 

 

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Connor's mom said over dinner. They were both home at the same time, and any time there was a free meal, you bet Connor was there, reaping the benefits. He had worked for years in a kitchen. He knew how to cook for himself. But he also knew that food tasted better when someone else made it for you. Plus, he hated cooking. 

 

“It’s a great idea,” Connor said. It had been weeks since the initial seed of the idea had taken root in his brain. Now, the inside of his skull was just home to the nest of roots that reached every part of his thought process, in every circumstance. “Financial freedom,” he said. Lots of people said that on the tiny house YouTube videos he’d been watching. On the TV shows and the documentaries. 

 

“Financial freedom at what cost? Having one hundred square feet, and a toilet that doesn’t flush?”

 

“We’ve tricked ourselves into thinking that we need more than that, that we need a toilet that flushes.” Connor didn’t really care about being sustainable, which he knew made him a bad person. But living that small had the unintended consequences of being green, so he’d milk that. “Heating that small of a space takes almost no energy. Having a composting toilet saves so much water over time that you wouldn’t believe it.” 

 

“Where did you even come from?” His mom asked. It wasn’t accusatory, it more...in awe.

 

“From a life of watching you make the best choices that you could for you and your family. And I want to make the best decision for me.” It’s not like Connor needed her permission to spend his money, but he knew that all things in life were easier when his mom was on board. Plus, he had been thinking he’d build it in the circular drive in the front yard, and setting up his tools in the second stall of their garage which was ‘his’ enough for him to park his car there. He could park it on the street. At least until winter. He wasn’t sure where else he’d be able to do it.   
His mom gave him the I Know You’re Sucking Up look. “This is your whole savings.”

 

“It’s not like I have a family to support. I’m not married. All I have is myself, and the expanse of my future. Even if I live in it for a couple years and then sell it, I’d still be able to save an incredible amount of money from not having rent.” 

 

“You can do that in the basement,” his mom said. Connor knew it was a generous for his mom to let him live there. He knew that some of his friends had deadlines. Some hadn’t been welcome back after graduation. Connor hadn’t been pushed out of the nest. 

 

“I need my own space,” he said. “Even if it’s a small space.” 

 

“And you think you can build it on your own.” His mom leaned over her pork chop, her fork ignored on her plate. Connor thought he probably had her on board.

 

“Cam is going to help me.” Connor smiled his baby-of-the-family smile. Connor's mom was great, and while she loved him like the baby that he was, she respected her older son, who had, like any good first born, only made good mature decisions. He’d waited to employ Cam’s endorsement until he’d laid out the rest of his argument, and he knew now that it was the right choice. 

 

His mom raised an eyebrow. “Well, if Cam thinks that it’s a good idea…” she started, letting her thought hang in the air. If Connor had learned anything during his time as a younger sibling, it was how to work that angle. She paused to double back. “Cam actually thinks this is a good idea?”

 

“He’s excited about having a brothers project,” Connor said. 

 

“Neither of you have ever used tools before.” It was true. They weren’t a fix it family. His mom hired someone to come fix whatever was broken, or covered it in duct tape. 

 

“We’re excited to learn. I can show you the tutorials online if you want.” At some point, the dinner stopped being a meal and started being a business meeting with a bowl of mashed potatoes in the middle of the table. Connor felt like he was trying to convince investors that his idea could make it off the ground. 

 

“Oh,” his mom said, “there are YouTube videos?” Connor's mom was never more than five feet away from her iPad. She watched a lot of baking videos for things she would never make. 

 

“Would you let us build it in the circle drive, and the second stall of the garage?”

 

“How long is this going to take, exactly?”

 

“Three, maybe four months.” 

 

“You’re not going to accidentally set anything on fire?” 

 

“Well, that’s not part of the plan.” 

 

She sighed a long-suffering mom sigh that Connor had heard many, many times in his life. He’d never been happier to hear it than at this moment. “Alright, kid. Go to town.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

Dylan didn’t go home often. He remembered his older brother coming home all the time to eat dinner or do his laundry. Often both. He remembered coming downstairs for lunch and seeing Ryan on the couch taking a nap. Didn’t he have an apartment to nap in? Dylan would find Ryan’s girlfriend in the kitchen with his mom talking over coffee and reading magazines while they watched his dad making sandwiches for everyone.  

But now that his brother was married with a toddler and another on the way, there was nothing going on at their house. It was just his parents talking about retiring every five seconds even though they were ten years away from it, the living room littered with his mom’s crosswords and half-read novels, the garage bursting with their shared obsession with golf clubs. Toward the end of the day, his mom could reliably be found doing laps around the main floor to get her Fitbit steps in for the day if she was close to a goal, or close to leading the challenge group that was family mandated.

Dylan never led the group. Ever. 

His dad’s obsession with food had spiraled, and while the fridge and pantry were filled with pop-tarts and gallons of skim milk when Dylan had lived there, he now suspected that his dad’s jars of expensive olives and aged cheeses must have been insured. 

It was a zoo, to have the house filled again, with Ryan’s wife Megan and their three and a half year old, Sophie. His dad was over the stove, poking at chicken breasts that he’d wrapped with bacon. Or prochutto. Dylan wasn’t clear on the distinction. His mom was happily putting on Fitbit steps by chasing Sophie around in the living room. 

The topic of conversation was, to put it roughly, Ryan’s Life. His mom asked Megan question after question both about the child she was chasing, and the child Megan was carrying. Listen. Dylan wasn’t really planning on having a pregnant woman in his life any closer to him than Megan was. He couldn’t help his disinterest. It was a very technical, biological conversation. 

“And what are you thinking of for names?” His mom asked. They had just found out it was another girl — that’s why his mom had invited them all over for Sunday dinner. She’d made a crock pot of tiny meatballs that were shamelessly Dylan’s favorite. She said she’d used grape jelly as part of the sauce and Dylan saw his dad roll his eyes in superiority. Dylan didn’t care what was in it. The meatballs were delicious, and it was nice to feel like he had something in common with Megan again. It was like they were racing each other to the bottom of the crock pot. It was what Dylan was using as his excuse not to talk. Megan was not being deterred from talking by the food in her mouth, and Dylan respected that. 

“We’re not really sure, but we’re thinking something more classic than weird. Everyone is naming their kid Brayedelynn and we’re just not into it.” 

“There are plenty of good family names that are very classic.” His mom suggested. Megan’s family wasn’t super involved with their lives. Ryan and Megan had been together forever, and it was many years ago Dylan accepted Megan as his defacto big sister. Not even his sister-in-law. She was more than just married to his brother. She’d lived with them her senior year of high school when her family life had gotten too crazy. 

Megan smiled. “Yeah, a family name would be nice,” she said. 

Dylan let himself fade into the background as his parents kept up the baby talk. He was fairly certain that, even if it hadn’t been the original plan, his parents were glad they had kids for this reason: being grandparents. He took a plate of meatballs with him into the living room. 

The TV was on in the living room, even thought it was on mute. It was functionally the same space as the kitchen, but even so, when Ryan came to sit down next to Dylan, looking a little lost without having a baby to take care of, they could still manage a reasonably private conversation, separate from baby names. 

“Megan wants to name her after mom, but we don’t want to tell her until she’s born,” Ryan said. Okay, maybe not so separate from baby names. He and Ryan had been best friends as kids, a year and a half separating them from each other. Ryan’s life had left a rift that wasn’t there emotionally — they still loved each other — but was there in the time they got to spend together now. Ryan was, Dylan would admit, a very good dad and a very good husband. He was at his family’s beck and call, and while it made Dylan miss him like crazy, he knew that his brother had found the thing in his life that made him happy. 

Dylan didn’t think a wife and a baby was going to work for him. 

He sat next to Megan when the food was done, and she made him feel the baby kick. It was...weird. But Ryan looked over at him like it was the best thing that had ever happened on planet earth. And it was kind of cool, he supposed when he thought about it that way.

 

\-- 

 

“Okay,” Connor said, sitting in the circle drive in front of his mom’s house, his 7’x20’ trailer under his butt. It was black, and rigged with lights, and had a long way to go before it was Connor's house. But. But this was Connor's house. 

 

“We got the trailer today.” It seems ridiculous to think that by the end of summer, he’d be living in the space no larger than the trailer. He laid out on it and stretched his arms up and back, the wooden slats of the trailer cold beneath him. It was spring, but Connor couldn’t wait any longer. Behind the camera, Cam was laughing at him. His sweet little Golden Retriever was laying on the corner of the trailer, content to find a spot to sleep as always.

 

Connor was getting good at shooting and editing video on his phone. He had an app for it. It was pretty straightforward, especially because he wasn’t doing anything particularly fancy. He had five videos up on his channel, mostly about design. There were barely any views on them, just slightly more than zero, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to document it.

 

“Tell everyone why we’re not actually starting today,” Cam said, a voice behind the camera. 

 

Connor sat up to look at his phone in his brother’s hands. “Because it’s too cold,” he said, huddling illustratively into his coat. The day before had been sunny and wonderful, which is why Connor had decided to pull the trigger on the project and pick up his trailer. But when he’d woken up this morning, the lawn was crunchy with frost. 

 

“Also,” Cam said, pointing the camera toward his own face, “we have no idea what we’re doing.” 

 

“Details,” Connor said, rolling his eyes. They had plans. Connor could read. Cam gave Connor his phone back while they unhitched the trailer from Connor's pickup and headed out to Home Depot to get the supplies for the subfloor.

 

Cam filmed him again going down the aisles of lumber, pulling a flat cart behind him. He was talking to one of the employees helping them, pointing to the list he had printed out on their mom’s printer and was checking off the wood they needed as they loaded it onto the cart. 

 

The employee, Taylor his name tag said, was asking Connor about his project, and his face was bright talking about it, the excitement of actually getting started glowing off of his face. He was glowing like a pregnant woman. 

 

They packed the lumber into the bed of Connor's truck, and Cam turned the camera back to him, his face staying on the road as they drove back to their mom’s house. “I know it’s just the subfloor and everything,” he started. “It’s barely anything. But we have the tools from the tool library, and we have the plans, and we have the trailer. Cooking never made me this excited. School, even though I liked it, was good enough, I guess? I feel a little bit on fire, I guess.” He was barely even talking about it anymore, just vibrating with excitement. 

 

“We’re not doing anything tonight,” Cam declared, as they unloaded the lumber into the second stall of the garage. The tools were there too: the circular saw, the nail gun. Connor had bought a power drill of his own, because he anticipated using it a lot, and not just for building the house, but for maintenance, and who knows what else. Maybe he’ll get good enough to help his mom fix stuff around their house. 

 

Connor conceded to Cam’s demand. He was tired. The excitement had been a lot. They’d woken up early to drive the two hours to get to the place they bought the trailer. There had been closer places, but driving a little out into the country meant that he got a slightly better deal on it, so the drive was worth it. Cam had spent the night before in his childhood bedroom, which was now the guest/exercise room, just so they could leave as soon as the sun rose. 

 

They ordered a pizza and watched a playoff hockey game that they didn’t care about because the Leafs never had a hope in the world of winning the cup. Cam carefully cut up a banana for his dog Ella Mae and she ate it out of his hands like the little princess she was. 

 

Connor edited his video and threw it up on his YouTube channel. He felt both like they got nothing accomplished, and a ton accomplished. But until he hammered his first nail, measured and cut his first board, he couldn’t think of his project as actually started. 

 

Still, he could barely sleep for excitement.  


 

\--

 

 

Dylan’s job created a combination of days that blended together into an identical Groundhog’s Day that he lived over and over, and days that were so uniquely horrible that he couldn’t describe them. He knew he had a roof over his head. He knew he was paying down his student loans, though slowly. He could feed himself. But he felt like he was existing instead of prospering. 

 

It was a Wednesday night. Every night felt like a Wednesday night to him. Days of work behind him, days of work before him. His apartment building was tall, and would have a great view if there was anything out his window to look at. On his Facebook page, another one of his friends got engaged. Another was proud to announce their new promotion. Barf.

Dylan quickly clicked over to YouTube. His recommended videos were all the same crap: funny vlogger, weird ASMR video with unintentionally sexy whispering, an eastern European man smashing things with a pneumatic press. 

 

“Fuck that,” Dylan whispered, pulling up his random number generator in an extra tab. He copy-pasted the number into the YouTube search bar, and hit enter. 

 

There was a lot of weeding to do at this stage. What Dylan was interested in was completing the loop of human connection that these personal videos sent into the void were missing. These videos needed viewers like a speaker needed ears. Just one set of ears would be fine. Dylan would bear witness. 

 

“House listing, house listing, car listing…” He murmured under his breath. He clicked through a few pages of results. He found a promising looking video, but it was just a soundless fourteen seconds out a car window down a suburban street. 

 

The next page gave him something interesting. 74298374.mov. “Can’t even bother to title it,” Dylan said, clicking on a video that had chosen a shot inside Home Depot as the thumbnail.  
It didn’t start out in Home Depot though. It started out outside a house, a boy sitting on a trailer, the smile on his face tooth-and-gums wide, a Golden Retriever laying by him. Could anything in the world be more wholesome?

 

Dylan clicked on the full-screen button in the bottom corner of the video as he settled back into his couch. His apartment was always eerily silent when he was home alone. The walls between apartments in his building were mercifully thick, and Dylan barely made a sound. 

 

“Connor you’re such a dork,” a voice said behind the camera, clearly a handheld shot. It was intimate, a conversation between the camera holder and the boy on the trailer, sprawled out on his back, grinning up at the sky. 

 

“Cam, big bro, I’m going to live here soon. This is going to be my house.” He sounded the way Ryan sounded when he talked about his wife, his daughter, and his impending baby. His voice was unbearably fond, and Dylan felt like a voyeur. 

 

This was his favorite kind of video. Even if this kid was a tiny house weirdo. Dylan had seen posts that his aunts had shared on Facebook. They were too fucking cute for Dylan. He looked at the boy on the trailer, then looked around his apartment. It was maybe 500 square feet, which split between two adults who really had nothing to do with each other, was the very minimum amount of space that he needed in order to breathe. 

 

But he kept watching the video. Cam looked like a slightly older version of the trailer kid, who in proper lighting was blonde and broad-shouldered, and very, very Dylan’s type. There was no part of the video where Connor wasn’t gleaming. It was clear that his older brother was filming his adventure because his love for his kid brother was pure. Dylan could see why. Connor was so vulnerable on camera. Dylan wondered if he knew how unguarded and candid he looked, his eyes almost always missing looking at the camera because he was looking straight at his brother. They walked through the aisles of Home Depot dumping things into a cart, getting a flat cart for the lumber and then driving home. Connor was barely talking about anything anymore. He was just glowing. Dylan knew his mom would say that Connor had a new soul. He was a fresh one, going through life for the first time. His soul hadn’t been trampled yet.  
The video finished. It was an absolute hack job of editing, but Dylan could care less. There was high production value all over this site. Fourteen-year-olds had DSLRs and special mics and lighting setups. At one point in the video, Connor had gotten annoyed by Cam’s teasing and had demanded his phone back from him. So he filmed on his phone. 

 

Dylan clicked through to his channel. Connor McDavid. He had five videos up, and they all had fewer than three views, and every one had the original name of the file as the title. Nothing had tags on it. 

 

Dylan started at the first video. It was just the boy, Connor, sitting in a bedroom that looked like he’d lived in it forever. There was a Sidney Crosby poster behind him, and Toronto Blue Jays sheets on his bed. He looked Dylan’s age though, mid-twenties, probably still living with his parents if he was saving to build a tiny house. 

 

“Hi Internet,” the boy said into the camera, actually looking at it and not the brother holding the camera like the video Dylan found. “I’m sure this is a stupid idea, but my life has been made on stupid ideas. I'm not married, I don’t have kids, I’m barely my own responsibility at this point. I’m twenty-four years old, and I’m going to build my own house this summer with my brother.” 

 

His voice was low and quiet. Dylan turned his speakers up, readjusted the laptop on his stomach, and settled in to watch all eleven minutes of this rambling vlog that had been seen by two people before. It was possible that both those play counts were from Connor himself, too. 

 

It was dark in Connor's room, and the video wasn’t edited with tight jump cuts the way that the popular vloggers’ videos were. Dylan waited out Connor's slow thoughts on why he needed his own space, his own project. It was only the second video he’d watched, and he felt himself getting a little attached to him. 

 

“Mostly I need a sense of purpose. My job recently ended. The restaurant I worked in closed. It was probably a good thing really, because I hated it there. I hated the cooking and the hours. Obviously now I’m unemployed, but getting another cooking job sounds...like the worst. So instead I’m going to spend my entire savings building this tiny house. Even though I’ve never built anything before. Like, nothing. Not even a birdhouse.” Connor laughed, self-deprecating, ducking his head away from the camera. He was not a performer, that was for sure. Dylan could almost see a blush rising on his cheeks, but the room was so dark that the video was grainy. 

 

It was over before he knew it, and Dylan just changed the settings to play them all, finishing again with the video with the trailer. 

 

He subscribed to Connor's channel and tried very hard not to watch through all his videos again. There had been a quite endearing one where Connor had printed out the plans he was going to use, and held them up to the camera, blurry as all shit, and described in granular detail how he was going to use each inch of space. He talked about having a tablet instead of a bunch of books and movies and video games. He had many storage ideas for his kitchen space. He referenced his Pinterest, which made Dylan laugh. 

 

Five quite dull internet videos about some kid’s dumb tiny house project later, and Dylan had a crush. Connor was handsome and sweet, and he had the spark of passion about his project that was fucking magnetic. Dylan wanted to sit down with him and talk all about the kinds of flooring that he has to choose from, weighing the benefits and downfalls of each. He wanted to go with him to the tool library for a miter box. He wanted to make endless trips to Home Depot for yet another few packs of screws, or exterior paint, or hinges for the table that folds down. He never wanted to set foot in it though. 

 

Dylan didn’t give two shits about building a tiny house. Dylan was pretty claustrophobic, honestly. He liked being outside, and when he wasn’t outside, he liked warehouse kinds of spaces. He and his roommate had the apartment on the top floor of their building, so they could have vaulted ceilings. He could easily lay down on his bathroom floor there was so much space.  
But Dylan didn’t have to worry about that when he was just watching this kid’s videos.

 

He pried himself off the couch. His roommate was in his own room, probably already asleep. So Dylan brushed his teeth, put his pajamas on, and snuggled into bed, and started Connor's videos from the beginning. 

 

He thought this was probably his best Lonely Internet find so far.

 

\--  


 

 

The subfloor wasn’t going well. 

 

“Fuck, this piece is too short,” Connor said, sliding a board to be screwed in place for support. It was easily two inches too short to reach the other side of the frame. It was not something that they could remedy.

 

“Well, we’ll cut another, and this one we’ll figure how to use for something else.” Cam was rational and calm in the face of his brother’s anxiety. They looked at the plans again, measured the too-short board, and sure enough, they’d just fucked up the cut. It was not the first board they’d done that to. Connor thought he was being careful. 

 

“How did this happen?” Connor asked, worrying the tape measure in his hand. Cam shrugged. 

 

“We’re brand new at this, and we’re figuring it out,” he said. He grabbed another board, and Connor measured it out and marked it to be cut. They were getting okay at using the circular saw. It was satisfying, and not as difficult as Connor thought it would be. The hard part was making sure that all the pieces fit together in the end. It was less a saw issue and more a measurement issue. The new board fit perfectly. They screwed it into place and kept moving along.

 

Framing out the subfloor took the entire weekend. Connor had even gotten a head start on that Wednesday, measuring out the boards to be cut, per the plans. 

 

Cam grabbed his phone from him periodically to get shots of him nailing things together, going back around to sink screws for added security, and tucking the insulation between the supports before they nailed the top of the subfloor to the frame. It hadn’t taken much convincing to get Cam’s help, and Connor wasn’t sure how he would have even been able to start without him. Even going to buy supplies was at least a two-person job. They could benefit from another set of hands, of course, but when they really needed a third person, they could get their mom, probably, or one of their friends.

 

It was even easy to get Cam onboard with doing filming for his YouTube channel, which featured impressive play counts now of five-ish. Connor had mostly expected to get zero hits, so anything was good, honestly. What he was really creating was the ability to go back and watch these videos later, in ten years when he was thirty-four and old and decrepit, to be able to look back on the cool thing he’d done in his youth. 

 

Sunday night his hands were beginning to get blisters from the nail gun. He and Cam had picked splinters out of each other’s fingers. They had made a Home Depot run for more nails, screws, and work gloves. 

 

The trailer looked pretty much the same as it had when Connor had first brought it home - at least, that’s what he thought anyone else would see. A black metal trailer with a wooden bottom. But it was the first step, a check mark to make on his plans. He hadn’t felt this proud of himself since he graduated from college — an accomplishment he thought would have made more of a difference in his life. 

 

The brothers ate dinner at their mom’s dinner table like they were kids, hearing about their mom’s patients like old times. Cam talked a little about his clients and a little about Ella Mae as she slept under his chair, and Connor's family patiently listened to him talk about the progress on his trailer, even though he could tell that his mom was already a little sick of it, and two full days of building a fucking floor had taken the excitement out of Cam. Connor loved his family. But sitting at the dinner table like this, like he was still in high school, reminded him why he needed his own space.

 

\--

 

The worst day of Dylan’s whole week was Sunday. It wasn’t even Monday. Once he faced the fact that he had another five-day chunk of hell, doled out in eight and a half hour chunks, he could face it. But he had Sunday Dread like no other. He couldn’t enjoy the fact that he wasn’t at work, because he was thinking about how he only had ten hours, eight hours, two hours, until he had to go to bed to wake up on time for work on Monday morning. 

 

He’d been like that his whole life. He dreaded high school, he dreaded college, he dreaded his job. 

 

He figured, depressingly, that his life would likely just continue on like this as far as he could see. 

 

He was eating a lackluster cold cut sandwich from a sub shop down the street that delivered, flipping through the channels. There was hockey on, but it was so depressing to keep watching his team lose that he flipped past it, and kept flipping until he hit on one of those dumb tiny house shows on one of the home networks.

 

Dylan would have flipped right past it faster than a show about teen wizards, but seeing someone staple roofing onto the roof of a little house trailer made his heart zing a little. Dylan hadn’t had a crush on someone like this since college, when he worked at a gas station and the same ungodly attractive guy came in to buy terrible coffee and flirt with him every morning. That guy had been blonde and quiet too — he was willing to admit that he had a type — but he didn’t make Dylan’s heart zing because of the animated passion and conviction in his voice the way Connor did. His stomach buzzed when his gas station crush came in because he called Dylan ‘sweetheart,’ and sometimes would buy candy and leave it for him, even though it was technically against the rules. It was a different kind of crush. Dylan felt like he had a little more of a crush on who Connor was than just on his face. There were plenty of hot people on the internet. You didn’t even have to look hard. 

 

The guy on TV was talking about stairs vs. a ladder to get up to the loft area, and Dylan was already unconsciously checking his phone, to see if he got any email updates about Connor's channel. Even if there wasn’t a new video, he’d probably watch the trailer one again. Connor was just so earnest in it. It was sweet in a way that cheered Dylan up when he was feeling like a piece of shit, the way he was that night. 

 

He almost breathed a sigh of relief when there was a new video to watch, and had a moment where he felt motionless, arrested in the place between deciding to watch it on his tiny phone screen right now, or go get his computer and let it boot for a couple minutes first. 

 

He got his computer.

 

His computer was a hunk of black plastic that sometimes sounded like it was going to blow up. He was thinking of getting a new one, but he needed a few more months to save. Instead, he just waited patiently as the fans turned on full blast to try to start cooling it immediately. 

 

When he finally pulled Connor's video up, the annoyance with his computer was gone. He was giddy again, his thoughts silly and ridiculous for an eight-minute video about someone he didn’t know doing something he didn’t care about. 

 

“Subfloor day!” Cam announced, his voice too loud, mouth likely right next to the phone’s mic. He could barely hear Connor's response, his arms curled in an oversized hooded sweatshirt, hair messy from sleep. His eyes were bright though, and he made a tumbler of coffee appear out of nowhere. The sun was still working on rising, and Connor leaned against the garage and told the camera about how they were going to use the saw for the first time, and they’d stayed up late watching YouTube videos about circular saws and that’s why he was so tired. He pulled his hood up over his head and cuddled into it, and Dylan almost died. Did he have any idea how adorable that was? 

 

Cam got a couple disjointed shots of Connor making the first cut (too long hoodie gone, for safety, Crosby shirtsey appearing instead) and holding his hands over his head in triumph after. The rest of the video was little clips of the two of them being dumb brothers, struggling, fucking up, and getting more supplies, that little golden prancing around in the back of every other shot.

 

The guy at Home Depot gave Connor a hug when he saw him, and started talking just as fast as Connor did about the house. Connor was relaying all of their successes to the employee (Dylan was pretty sure his name was Taylor, based on how many time Connor called him that), who lead them down long aisles to get what they were looking for, and Cam shot the two of them from the back, the pride in Connor's voice plain and honest, and almost a little too much. 

 

The video ended with Connor once more sitting on the trailer, subfloor now complete, the actual structure of the house ready to be constructed on top of it. He got these little cheeks when he smiled, and Dylan could see his gums, and it was dorky. Dylan almost hit play again immediately after, but showed some restraint. 

 

Instead, he nudged his cursor into the comment box below the video. 

 

_Great job man. It’s been really exciting to watch this start to come together._

 

God, that was a stupid comment. He was a dumb idiot. He should say something...more than that. It was like not commenting at all. 

 

Still, he hit post, and his comment appeared forever online, and likely forever in Connor's email inbox. 

 

Only then did he hit play again. 

 

\--

 

 

Cam was only available to work on the house during the weekend. Connor knew they would get to a point where there would be things that he could do on his own, but until then, the work week stretched out in front of him, reminding him that he was a piece of shit. 

 

He woke on a Tuesday at quarter to noon, feeling the complete lack of purpose that made him want to start building a house in the first place. That lack of purpose was dangerous. Maybe he’d film a vlog for his channel. He wasn’t sure what he could even talk about, but it didn’t have to be long, and then he could pretend that he was making forward progress. 

 

He didn’t bother showering. His videos had been getting a couple more views on them, but only one of them had hit the double digits so far, so he wasn’t exactly worried about what he looked like. His hair was a little messy, but whatever. He at least pulled himself out of bed and put a shirt on. 

 

He curled up on the couch and held his camera so the front facing one was pointing at him. He knew the video quality wasn’t as good, but this wasn’t Hollywood. This was his mom’s basement. 

 

“The work week is the hardest for me because I’m, you know, unemployed,” Connor started out. He didn’t aim to make a vlog that made him sound lonely and pathetic, but when he was done, he watched it again to see if he needed to cut anything and thought he should probably cut it all. He sounded as sad as he looked. He kind of wanted to go to Home Depot to see if Taylor was there, but wanting to hang out with the guy at the home improvement store officially made him pathetic. He knew his friends from school were at work — they had respectable jobs at least. Years of working off-hours had eroded the friendships that he had, and replaced them with relationships with other industry people, who were asleep at the moment, and honestly weren’t that fun to hang out with. They always wanted to get drunk. Connor could only take so much of that. 

 

Instead of thinking about a way to fix the problem of his social life kind of only including his brother and a hardware store employee, he logged into his YouTube account to post his video.  
When he got in there, though, he had a notification.

 

“I have a comment?” Connor read out loud. He clicked the link to the comment. It was nice. Someone was following his progress. “Dylan,” Connor read out loud. He had a very tiny photo of himself (maybe? It was the internet, you never knew) as his icon, and all Connor could tell was that he had very floppy hair. He replied. 

 

_Thanks - glad you’re watching :)_

 

It was a dumb comment, but before he could overthink it, he hit post. It’s not like they were going to have some kind of long conversation based off of Dylan’s initial comment or anything. 

It felt...validating to Connor. Like, even if this one person was watching his progress and enjoying it, then doing this was worth it. Posting a vlog was doing something, because this was officially part of the project. It felt less self-indulgent with an audience. 

 

Even an audience of one. 

 

Quickly, he posted his vlog. Maybe he’d look for a part-time job or something for the work week.  


 

\--

 

 

Dylan’s heart skipped a beat when he got the email notification at work that Connor had replied to his comment. It wasn’t exactly poetry, but he’d been seen. He’d reached out into the internet and made contact with someone. 

 

It skipped again when he saw the video that Connor posted. 

 

It was almost lunchtime at work. Almost time for him to sit in the lunch room in the back corner alone, headphones in. He grabbed the sandwich he packed himself out of his lunch bag, and hit play on Connor's video. 

 

Connor had a blanket wrapped around him on a couch. He looked like he’d just woken up from a nap, his blonde hair flat on one side, still working on being fully functional. 

 

The vlog wasn’t really about the tiny house. It was mostly about how he felt useless and lonely, and how he thought he’d be somewhere different at twenty-four. That he liked working on the tiny house on the weekend with his brother, but that Monday through Friday was hard. 

 

He looked so tired that Dylan wanted to pull him close, let Connor lay his head in his lap and fall back asleep. It was a self-indulgent thought after a video that was so not about Dylan at all. It was selfish. 

 

Dylan was typing out a comment in response to the video as it ended. 

 

_I’m 24 too_ , he wrote. _And I’m feeling everything that you’re saying. Everyone is doing better than I am, and I’m just lagging behind, the person my classmates probably look at to compare themselves to in order to feel better about themselves, you know? It sucks._

 

He posted it. Then he watched Connor's video again, because once was never enough, and because Connor was so vulnerable and soft that Dylan could see himself getting addicted to this. He didn’t let himself watch it a third time because he had to be mindful of his data plan, and there was no wi-fi at work. 

 

He had a half hour lunch, and he spent twenty-five minutes of it sitting alone and fantasizing of quitting and walking out. It made him hate himself.

 

\--

 

Dylan commented again. It was quicker than Connor would have thought possible. He posted his video, he went to eat a bowl of cereal and take a shower, and when he got back to his phone to idly poke around on social media, he had a comment.

 

He had a nice comment actually, with some substance to it. The video had three views on it already, but Connor was starting to suspect that maybe Dylan was responsible for more than one. He must have channel updates turned on. He was Connor's only subscriber. 

 

If Connor was a girl maybe he’d feel freaked out, but he never had any reason before to be afraid of the people he encountered on the internet, so he didn’t give it a second thought. Dylan could relate to how he felt. 

 

He commented back, agreeing that he felt so far behind everyone else he’d gone to high school with, or college. Even the people who worked a shitty job alongside him at the restaurant seemed to have their shit together better than he did. He heard one of his coworkers mention the phrase “investment portfolio” and he almost threw up. Was he supposed to be investing already? 

 

An hour later his phone pinged with a notification that Dylan had sent him a private message instead of continuing their conversation in public on Connor's video. 

 

_Sorry if this is forward, but I figured if you wanted to keep talking this might be a better way? So our dumb comments about how inadequate we feel aren’t emblazoned on your YouTube account when your videos start to go viral and you get super famous._

 

Connor smiled. Yeah, the direct message was a better idea, probably. 

 

He was a little nervous, but he didn’t really know why. 

 

_Direct message works great for me. Where are you from?_

 

He waited, phone in his hands, body still, expecting Dylan’s message to shoot back to him immediately or something. Connor was sure Dylan had an actual life outside of being a fuck up on YouTube. But it was less than a minute before he got a reply.

 

_I’m from the GTA. I’m living in Toronto right now because I work downtown :( Your accent makes me think you’re not far from here either._

 

Connor smiled. Dylan lived in Toronto. That was so close. Not that this would go beyond a little internet chat, but he liked that there was someone out there so much like him so close to him. He wasn’t the GTA’s number one fuckup. Or at least, not the GTA’s only fuckup. 

 

_I’m from Newmarket. If you work downtown you’re probably not sucking at life too much._

 

_I’m currently hiding in the bathroom at work trying to avoid getting yelled at by my boss today, so don’t overestimate my station, haha._

 

Connor curled back up on the couch. In between messages from Dylan, he watched some daytime TV, and at some point made himself a sandwich. But for four hours, on and off, he and Dylan sent messages back and forth, mostly about the things they had in common. Hockey, the GTA, having an older brother. They talked about Connor's tiny house, and they talked about Dylan’s Craigslist roommate. Dylan talked about his job enough to let Connor know how much he hated it, and Connor shyly asked if Dylan’s icon photo actually was of him, floppy brown hair, easy smile and all — just so he could imagine the right person, after all. For no other reasons. He blushed as he sent it, but Dylan quickly shot back a confirmation. Slowly, they kind of ran out of things to talk about. Connor didn’t want to force it. It was nice having someone to talk to. He thought having his shitty job and living at home had been isolating, but living at home and being unemployed was even more isolating. He felt human again, having this conversation. It wasn’t nothing.

 

\--

 

Dylan wasn’t sure how he managed to spend the second half of his day at work doing jack shit and messaging a boy whose YouTube videos he watched, but he managed it. He would have a pile of emails to get through the next morning, but he smiled to himself on the train home. Somehow Connor had made Dylan’s workday not...awful. Every day at work was a tireless drudge, but feeling his phone buzz in his pocket every time he got a response from Connor made him tense up and relax at the same time. 

 

Dylan’s phone had been pretty quiet lately. He got lots of photos of Sophie from Ryan and Megan, but other than that, he only got texts from his friends when they wanted to go out, and his phone only rang when his mom missed him. And right then, when Mitch called him.

 

“Rehearsal got canceled cause the director’s kid is in the hospital. Come over for burritos?” Dylan wasn’t a man to turn burritos down, especially Mitch’s. He got off the train at his park and ride and headed to Mitch's gross house twenty minutes outside the city.

 

Dylan liked unwinding around Mitch. He knew him probably better than anyone, and knew he was a grump after a long office day. Mitch dutifully filled time with chatter as he laid out burrito assembly items across his counter. Dylan made himself two, and listened to him tell the story about the student production he was currently in, and how it was chaos.

 

However, once on their couch (with his roommate’s terrier), he casually started asking picking questions. It’s not that he treated Dylan like a delicate flower. It’s that he struggled with depression too. Mitch knew the right ways to ask things.

 

“How ya been?” he asked, mouth full of burrito. It was never a very serious topic with him.

 

“Job is getting on my last semblance of patience. I don’t even know what to do. My skin crawls when I walk into that building. Crawls. It’s a physical reaction to even being inside that place.”

 

Mitch did not do what most other people did when Dylan said something like this, which was to tell him to find a new job. It wasn’t as easy as “finding a new job.” Not when the last time he started to job search, he anxious puked four times in a row. Yes, anxious puking was a thing. There was a reason Dylan worked at a temp agency in the first place.

 

What he did instead was ask about his coping mechanisms. “You still watching YouTube?” He knew that was Dylan's main crutch. He had a few, but YouTube was his anchor, as dumb as it sounded (and he thought it sounded dumb pretty often).

 

“Yeah, yeah,” Dylan said, picking at the tortilla of his burrito. It was some quinoa/black bean/avocado/sweet potato business that made Dylan want to die of happiness. If he could get a job eating this burrito, he thought he’d be set. He felt his pocket buzz, a notification that Connor had messaged him, and smiled. “I actually, um,” he paused. He hadn’t thought he’d tell anyone about Connor. But really, there wasn’t much to tell. And Mitch was his best friend. “I found this kid who’s building a tiny house. I’ve been messaging with him a little.” He held his phone up as a signal that the message he’d just gotten was from the tiny house builder himself.

 

“Oh, well then,” he said, twisting his neck, and giving him a look that would have rivaled one his mom would make. An appraising look. There was lots of eyebrow involved. “Tell me about this young man. I hope you don’t mean he’s a literal child.”

 

“Jesus christ, no, he’s like, my age. He’s exactly my age.”

 

“And he’s cute, I assume.” _Based on what your stupid face looks like now, just talking about him_ , was the unspoken part.

 

“I’ll just play you his most recent vlog, I guess,” Dylan said, queueing up the video he had left a comment on. He’d watched it a few times, and there was a moment about two minutes in where Connor runs his fingers through his hair, and there’s a little piece of hair that sticks up, and stays up through the rest of the video. He thinks that might be his favorite part.

 

Mitch talked through it. “Okay, yeah, he’s cute,” he started with, and then went on to talk about his teeth, the way he says the word “hammer” (Dylan literally couldn’t hear a difference between how Connor said it and how he says it), the blanket he was covered in and fiddling with.

 

At the end, he smiled. “You have such a crush,” he announced like he’d figured that out all on his own.

 

“Yeah, I guess so. It’s fun. I haven’t had a crush in a while. I forgot about that butterfly/pukey feeling you get.”

 

“I don’t even remember the last boyfriend you had. How long ago was that?”

 

Dylan rolled his eyes. “It was that guy Michael, and it was, oh, a little over a year ago?” Dylan asked, as he tried to remember. It sounded right.

 

Mitch was a friends over boys kind of person, who had trouble keeping a long term boyfriend just because his schedule wouldn’t really allow it. It was fine for friendships when you don’t have that desperation to see the other person constantly and all the time, but he told Dylan once that the feeling of being constantly distracted by a person who you got to see once or twice a week was not his ideal situation. Neither was being single, but it was logistically superior, at least.

 

“Well, text him back,” he said, with a heavy eye roll.

 

“It’s just YouTube messaging right now,” Dylan said, opening his message from Connor, his smile involuntary.

 

“So ask for his number. How long have you been messaging him for?”

 

“All day.”

 

“Ask.”

 

So Dylan asked. 

 

He’d spent his whole day using up his willpower to act normal to Connor. He couldn’t very well send him a “please be my friend” message, because that was desperate. All of his messages were “please be my friend” messages. These things took time. However, having Mitch there was a fire under his ass. 

 

_Hey, I know this is maybe a little weird, but in the interest of keeping my data plan from haunting my bank account, do you want to trade phone numbers? We could text._

 

He hit send before he could think about it too much. He tried not to obsessively re-read the message he just sent lest he start hating himself. He figured he’d have to wait a while to get Connor's eventual “hey man no thanks that’s weird” message, but Dylan was still trying to find a comfortable position to fall asleep in when his phone buzzed again. The message was just Connor's phone number and a smiley face. 

 

Ugh, what did the smiley face mean?

 

Dylan texted him quick - _Hey it’s Dylan._ What, was he a writer or something?

 

Connor sent back one smiley face emoji, with little rosy round cheeks. It reminded him of Connor's little rosy round cheeks when he smiled big, after Cam told a dumb joke, or someone asked him some very tiny detail about his house. Dylan was already gone on him. 

 

“Send help,” he whispered. Mitch rolled his eyes heavily.

 

He was getting himself into something. He could feel it.


	3. Chapter 3

Connor spent his morning trying to think up an excuse to text Dylan. He knew Dylan was at work, and that he probably shouldn’t bother him. But he couldn’t stop thinking about him.   
Instead, he looked at the plans for his house and decided to go to Home Depot. He’d just poke around and get some ideas. He didn’t really need anything. He had to go with Cam to get lumber for framing out the walls, but they were going to wait a week. Cam was on a business trip, and wouldn’t get back to Newmarket until late Sunday afternoon, so Connor had a long weekend off, with only the responsibility of looking after Ella Mae.

 

Home Depot smelled like paint and fertilizer and oil, and Connor felt comfortable there like the store held the answer to his problems. Everything was organized, and the aisles were so tall, and there was always someone there to help you find what you needed. 

 

Connor walked up and down the aisles. He rifled through paint chips and picked up a few, just some colors he thought would go nicely together. He ran a finger along displays of hardware, different drawer pulls and hinges. He liked the idea of big bold hinges for the front door. 

 

“How’d that subfloor go, man?” Taylor asked, sneaking up on him from behind. Taylor was tall and tan and blonde and had teeth so straight Connor envied them. Taylor was cute, but not really Connor's type. He seemed to be there every time Connor was, and he seemed to think that his tiny house was actually pretty cool. 

 

Connor laughed. “It was a struggle,” he said. “We did it, but I’m surprised Cam and I both have all our fingers still.” 

 

“And you’re back already to buy...hardware? Is that jumping the gun?” Taylor leaned casually against one of the steel supports between shelves, his arms crossed casually across his chest. Taylor looked like the kind of guy who would surf a lot, or talk about surfing a lot if he had been born anywhere near California. 

 

“My brother is on a business trip this weekend so it’s jumping the gun even more than buying the supplies for the walls would be yet. I just wanted to come here and check things out, stay motivated.”

 

“I’m jealous that you get to do this. My girlfriend would never let me build a tiny house. She wants like, a work out room and a jetted tub and all kinds of stuff.” 

 

“Good thing she has a hook up at our local neighborhood handyman shop.” 

 

“I redid the guest bathroom a couple months ago, and I’m pretty sure it made her love me more. Lemme show you photos,” Taylor said, pulling his phone out of his pocket. His lock screen was a photo of him and a brunette wearing flannel and aviators, an easy smile. “That’s Ash,” Taylor said, as he unlocked his phone. The corners of his mouth turned up a little like he couldn’t help but smile when he saw Ash’s photo. Connor wanted that. Not for Taylor to smile like that about him, but for someone to. To have someone to smile about like that. 

 

“So Ash was cool with going with totally weird modern stuff,” Taylor said and went through the slideshow of their guest bathroom which was about four hundred pictures. But Connor nodded and mhmmm’d at the right points, because he knew Taylor got excited about his project. He could be excited about Taylor’s weird bathroom that his girlfriend was apparently completely head over heels with. 

 

“I’m a little afraid its weirdness is going to affect resale, but we’re not really planning on selling any time soon, and we might as well enjoy living there, right?” 

 

Connor wondered if he looked like that when he was talking about his tiny house. Like it was the thing that lit his engines, the reason to eat a good breakfast and get some cardio in every once in a while.

 

Eventually, Taylor couldn’t pretend he was helping Connor with anything and left him to help the middle-aged guy hovering around them pick out a new toilet paper holder or something. Connor wandered into the tool aisle. There was a whole wall of screwdrivers — an entire literal wall of them. Connor was struck dumb with how many of them there were, how many different screws needed a different driver. 

 

He backed up against the wall and took a selfie, furrowing his brows to look worried, the screwdrivers blanketing every space behind him. He sent it to Dylan. _At HD without Taylor. I’m screwed._  

 

The joke was dumb, the photo was dumb, but he was bored. And the conversation he’d had with Dylan the day before had been the best non-tiny house thing in his life in several weeks. Maybe several months. 

 

He was looking at ceiling fans when his phone buzzed in his pocket. It was two photos — in the first Dylan looked like he was laughing hysterically. In the second he was completely straight-faced. _That was the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. Just kidding._

 

The straight-faced photo was over-the-top intense, like he had to focus hard on not smiling. The only photo he’d seen of Dylan before was his tiny icon on his YouTube account. He’d kind of hoped he’d be as cute as he looked when very small. He sure seemed like it. He had a mess of brown hair that looked like it wanted to curl, and the darkest brown eyes. Connor kind of couldn't help himself. He wasn’t flirty to begin with — at least not in real life. Boys made him nervous. But on the phone, it didn’t seem so difficult. 

 

_You're cute when you're making faces. Is your normal face as cute?_

 

It was...more forward than Connor had been maybe ever in his life. But he was a grown up now. It was time to try to live outside his comfort zone a little. It was maybe two minutes before Connor got a response. Two people asked him if he needed help picking out a ceiling fan in that time. He was pretty sure a fan wouldn’t fit in his house. 

 

The photo Dylan sent was of a small coy smile. Yeah. He was cute. 

 

_Okay so cuter._ It was all Connor could think to respond. 

 

_You still in HD alone?_

 

_I mean, my new best friend and only person I’m not related to that I’ve talked to in about two weeks, Taylor I-Don’t-Know-His-Last-Name is around here somewhere. I’m not really_ alone _alone._

 

_That is the saddest most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard._

 

_I’m jobless, my friends aren’t. It’s two o’clock on a Wednesday. Who am I supposed to hang out with?_

 

_Go pet a dog at an animal shelter or something._

 

Connor laughed. That actually sounded like a good idea. At least it might relax him a little. He missed having a dog, which was something he’d told Dylan the night before. He texted Dylan on and off as he drove to the shelter. It was reasonably close to his house. They let him sit with a litter of puppies that just came up from a kill shelter in Louisiana and were waiting for foster homes. He took video while they crawled all over him and each other, their little puppy barks almost deafening as they reverberated off the cement walls. He was surprised he left without one. He’d have to get a smaller dog for his small house though. Not those German Shepard/Husky mixes.

 

When he got home he posted the video to his channel and texted Dylan. 

 

_New video inspired by you._

 

Dylan sent him back a long string of heart eyes emojis. 

 

_Those for me or the dogs?_

 

_Maybe both ;)_  


 

_\--_

 

 

Dylan had a list of things he should be doing to make himself happy and better himself. It was a thing he’d done since he was a teenager. Every once in a while he reevaluated himself, looked at his goals, and determined if they’re something he even cared about anymore. Sometimes he added new ones. 

 

_Work out regularly_ was one that took a while to catch on, but his building has a workout room in it, and he tried to do cardio three times a week and weights twice. He tried to limit his screen time before bed and kept takeout to twice a week. He crossed out “read a novel” a long time ago though. Somethings just weren’t going to happen. 

 

His main goal was so broad and vague that it was hard to pin down how to achieve it. _Be happy_. It was the goal that he’d struggled with the most since he graduated. He was good at assignments. When he decided to limit his takeout, he figured out a few quick recipes he could make and bought stuff for sandwiches. Defined goal. _Be happy_ was something that was the sum of all of Dylan’s choices, and even when he was making good ones, it didn’t always feel like they were adding to his general happiness. He still drudged through his day. He still kind of vaguely wanted it all to end. 

 

Dylan had been on medication for his depression on and off since he was fourteen, and by twenty-four, he had found a medication and dose that agreed with him. It didn’t make him happy. It didn’t make him into a zombie. It just made him able to deal with his life. To get out of bed in the morning and show up to work every day. 

 

Next to his goals list, he had a list of things that made him happy. His family, hockey, dogs, video games, Snapchat, shoes, Westworld, chocolate cake, being cold. Sometimes he looked at the list and it reminded him to call his mom, or eat a Snickers, or play some Fortnight. Sometimes he added something. 

 

He was looking at his list of goals on his lunch at work when Connor texted him the silliest selfie with the worst dad joke ever. He had been trying to figure out an excuse to text him, but his morning at work had been busy, and he didn’t think a good morning text was appropriate. This was nice though. It was silly and casual, and it made Dylan feel like he really knew Connor. He wondered if Connor had Snapchat. Even in his dumb joke photo he was handsome, lips pink, his blonde hair in a gelled swoop backwards. He’d seen Connor with messy hair, after waking up or after a shower, and his neatly gelled hair that he wore out into the world made Dylan feel tender toward the messy bangs that fell over Connor's forehead and made him look young. 

 

They sent each other a few more photos throughout the day. Dylan sent him a photo of his running shoes, pre-workout. Connor countered with his dinner: seven Oreos and some mac and cheese. Dylan sent him a photo of him cuddling his roommate’s cat. Connor sent a selfie from when he was laying out on his subfloor, and a terrible blurry one of the moon. _Feeling tiny and lonely_ , he’d captioned it. 

 

Summer was just starting, but the sun was already going down later and later. It was dark enough to see the stars, so it was well past ten, and Dylan was curled in his bed having the same existential crisis he felt like he had every week. He couldn’t make himself try to text Connor what he was feeling. So instead, he hit call. 

 

“Dylan,” Connor answered, his voice deep and quiet, just like in his videos. Except now he was using that voice to say Dylan’s name. He sounded a little surprised, but not disappointed. Maybe he should have asked if Connor wanted to talk on the phone before he called, but Connor could always just make an excuse to hang up. Dylan would get it. He wouldn’t press. 

 

“Hey,” he said, his first word spoken to Connor McDavid.

 

“Too much existential dread for you? Are you calling me to tell me to shut up about my feelings on my place in the universe?” 

 

“I’m just calling because you said you were lonely, and um, I guess I’m feeling that way too.”

 

“What are you doing?” 

 

“Trying to fall asleep, I guess,” Dylan said. He went weeks where he could barely keep his eyes open, napping with the same frequency as Hector, the cat. Other weeks, he felt like he couldn’t get a full hour in at night. 

 

“My schedule has been so out of whack and nonexistent lately that my body is really confused as to when sleep is supposed to happen. I’m not being very nice to it.” 

 

“I saw those Oreos earlier. You’re being plenty nice.” 

 

“You’re the one running.” 

 

“There are so many ways to be nice to yourself. Sometimes you have to lay out on the trailer you’re making into a house and look up at the stars.” 

 

“Sometimes you have to call your internet friend and hash things out.” 

 

Dylan laughed. Talking with Connor was exactly like texting him. They had the same easy rhythm, except Dylan didn’t have to wait long minutes to get a reply. He got Connor's reaction immediately. 

 

“How’s your brother?” Dylan asked. He knew that Connor orbited Cam a little. He was a classic little brother. Part brat part follower. Dylan could hear the smile in Connor's voice as he started talking about the business trip Cam was on, and how he was making sure he was getting to all of the best bakeries. Cam loved donuts with a religious fervor that seemed incongruous with the way that he looked - trim and built and generally handsome, the way Dylan was getting used to McDavids being. 

 

“How’s your brother doing?” Connor was such a nice polite Canadian boy, which was exactly Dylan’s type. He didn’t always have it in him to be kind, but kindness attracted him like a moth to a flame.   


 

“His wife is about to pop out a baby at any minute,” Dylan said, telling him about his brother’s family a little, and Megan. 

 

“Your parents are really cool for letting her stay with you guys in high school.” 

 

“Yeah. My mom grew up in a tough family, and I know she would have loved to have had a safe place in high school, so I think that was the driving force behind it. I think that’s a big reason why she and my mom are so close.” 

 

“Are you excited for the baby?” 

 

“Oh, yeah. Sophie made my brother an actually happy person. Megan wants like five kids. They’re meant to be parents, you know? They’re parent type people.” 

 

“You say that like you’re not a parent type person.”

 

“I don’t really think I am. I have a hard enough time taking care of myself.” 

 

“You could do it if you wanted it. You’d get it together.” 

 

“I don’t think I want it though. I don’t want a kid who needs me 24/7. I don’t even know what I want out of life, let alone a person I have to form.” 

 

“Sounds like you’ve made a decision.” 

 

“At least for now,” Dylan said. There was a pause on the line before Connor started talking again. 

 

“I don’t think that I do either. I mean, obviously I’m building this microscopic living structure, I sure don’t want a baby any time soon. But also, being gay complicates things, and I don’t want a baby enough to go through that. I want those resources to go toward a couple who really wants it.” 

 

“I didn’t know you were gay,” Dylan said, the words slipping out of his mouth before he could put a cap on it. He was sleepy and feeling safe in his bed. It didn’t make for good filtering, apparently. 

 

“It’s not a big deal or anything,” Connor said. It was the first time Dylan heard a harsh edge to his voice, the first moment that made it click with him that Connor had layers too. 

 

“I was just surprised because I feel like with everything we talk about I find more things we have in common.” 

 

“Oh. You too?” Connor said. It was hard to say if he sounded shy, because Connor always sounded a bit little. Little in a way that made Dylan want to protect him. 

 

“Yeah,” Dylan said. He laughed. He was too tired to be functioning and felt a little sleep drunk. “Super gay.” 

 

Connor giggled, and Dylan could hear the wind through the tall grass that surrounded the area his trailer was stationed, the little sounds that were loud in the night. “Does super gay Dylan have a boyfriend?” Connor asked, and it was Dylan’s turn to giggle. 

 

“You’re totally hitting on me,” Dylan said, trying to keep his voice down so his roommate couldn’t hear him. What was he supposed to tell him? That he was flirting with a boy he met through YouTube? He’d die of the shame. 

 

“Well, let me know if I’m not allowed to then.” 

 

“You’re allowed to,” Dylan said. “No boyfriends here.” 

 

“Me neither,” Connor said. 

 

“Kinda figured. Unless you had a thing with your favorite Home Depot employee.” 

 

“Taylor is already taken, and straight, which I know because he showed me about a thousand photos of the bathroom they re-did together. They’re both handy, apparently.”

 

“I guess you’d want the guy selling you hinges to know what he’s talking about.” 

 

“I appreciate his wealth of knowledge.”

 

Dylan was struggling to keep his eyes open, so he closed them, curled up on his side, pulled his covers up around him, and balanced his phone on his head, so the speaker was still reasonably close to his ear. It was easy to talk to Connor because Connor heard him. He didn’t have to worry about not being able to explain his feelings down to nothing because he could relate his own feelings, his own situations, his own stories to Dylan. Dylan felt like Connor was his witness in this moment. He felt like they had been friends for longer than the...three or four days since they had started talking. Dylan didn’t usually get sucked into friendships so quickly or easily. He usually had to take the time to warm up to people, to figure them out. 

 

“Dyl,” Connor said, and Dylan’s attention snapped back to the conversation. He didn’t even remember where his thoughts had been. “Are you sleeping?”

 

“Naw,” Dylan said, his voice coming out thick and slow. Finally, his brain was trying to go to sleep, but it was currently the most inopportune time. He didn’t want to hang up. “I’m still awake.” 

 

“You’re such a liar,” Connor said. Dylan wished he could have seen Connor's face when he said that. The words had come out so gently. 

 

“I don’t want to hang up,” Dylan admitted. 

 

“Then don’t. I’ll talk for a little while, and you can fall asleep whenever you want, alright? And text me in the morning?” 

 

Dylan smiled. “Yeah.” 

 

“Alright. ‘Night, Dyl.” Dylan wasn’t sure when Connor had decided they were close enough for nicknames. Only his family and about three of his friends ever called him Dyl. It made his heart swell instantly. Clearly, Dylan was easy for him. 

 

“‘Night, Connor.” 

 

Connor made a soft, pleased sound in the back of his throat, and started telling the story of the first time he’d gone snowboarding. Connor was a good storyteller, especially for bedtime stories. His voice was steady and soft and deep, and Dylan wanted to fall asleep in it. Instead, he just fell asleep to it.   


 

\--

 

 

Connor woke to a text from Dylan. It was Saturday, and Cam was nowhere to be seen. He was pretty sure he was still in the states. Alabama or Tennessee or something. He could never keep track of the states south of the Mason/Dixon line. 

 

_First good night’s sleep in a while. Thanks._

 

Connor let him have a moment to let his heart feel big and warm. He bit his lip and let himself think about Dylan’s easy laugh and brown eyes. Then he pulled himself out of bed. 

 

Connor knew he needed a job. He was going so crazy with nothing to do that his mom had started giving Connor chores. Connor was twenty-four and still had chores. He was losing what little self-respect he had. 

 

It was easier said than done to get a job though. The market was tough. He didn’t want something that would take up too much of his time. The only jobs he could think of were ones he’d already had. Cook, server, barista. He’d always only had food service jobs, and part of wanting to build a tiny house was wanting to never have to work in a kitchen again. 

 

He went to the mall to get himself out of the house. He had thought about going to look at different plumbing options for his house, but he could only make himself go into Home Depot so many times without actually having a reason to be there. 

 

The mall was busy, and Connor liked the bustle around him. It had been so long since he’d been this close to so many people. He wasn’t looking to really buy anything. He had been spending a lot of time recently thinking about the things that he already owned, and how he would have to cut that down to a small fraction of items. He didn’t need new clothes or shoes. He didn’t really need anything. 

 

He bought himself a fountain Coke and browsed. It was hard for him to look at all of the shops with so many things to buy, so many people laden with bags. How many of these people went home to put away their new bags of clothes to find they didn’t have room in their closet anymore? How many men bought new sneakers to add to their staggering collection?

 

Connor knew it wasn’t his place to judge. He knew he was having something of a little quarter-life crisis. That the thoughts he was having were a reaction to losing his job, and coming up close and personal with his feelings of being a failure. Still, knowing this didn’t actually keep him from judging. 

 

Eventually, he ended up in an electronics store. He’d been thinking about getting a pair of Bluetooth headphones lately. His last pair of headphones had been broken for two months. It wouldn’t be buying another thing he didn’t need or had already. 

 

The clerk was a teenager who sat behind the counter on his phone, which suited Connor fine. He’d always hated the customer service aspects of all of his jobs. It’s how he’d ended up in the kitchen in the first place.

 

He took his time, sipped his Coke. He was well aware of how he had nowhere to be and nothing to do that day. The headphones they had weren’t Bluetooth though, and the display of phone cases was so disorganized and messy it was starting to stress him out. Then he saw it, behind a tangle of Android cases that were marked down to half off: a tripod for his phone. It had a little mount to fit his iPhone, and three legs that bent, so he could wrap them around something. It’s not like he was some kind of serious vlogger. He knew that the people who had a fan base had expensive cameras and lighting kits and stuff. He wasn’t into that. He just wanted to maybe shoot some time-lapse video of raising the walls and stuff. Or something. He’d figure it out. 

 

It was on clearance too, and when Connor left the mall, he’d spent a total of eleven dollars. He actually felt pretty good about it. When he got back to his car, he took a photo of the tripod and sent it to Dylan. _Steppin up my game._

 

It was a while before Dylan texted back, a selfie of him and a boy, a little brunette who had pointy features. _If you’re bored you could entertain me because this fool isn’t doing any good. Meet Mitch, btw. He’s an asshole._

 

_Ha, I can only go to so many animal rescues before I start hoarding dogs._

 

Dylan sent back a bunch of puppy emojis, and a photo of a grizzled looking animal that Connor suspected started this life as some kind of terrier. Dylan clarified it was Mitch’s roommate’s ancient dog, Trooper. _Not exactly a pile of puppies crawling adorably all over me, but I’m working with what I have._

 

Connor spent the next several hours on the couch in the family room, texting Dylan and watching a Blue Jays game idly. The Jays were losing. He was thinking of putting on a movie when he got a FaceTime call from Dylan. He tentatively answered it. 

 

The face he was looking at though, was not Dylan. 

 

“You were right dude, he is cute,” Mitch said, looking off to the side. 

 

“What?” He heard Dylan ask. 

 

“Hi Mitch,” Connor said. It looked like Mitch had maybe stolen Dylan’s phone. 

 

“I said you could play Angry Birds dude, not harass my friends.” Mitch disappeared in a tumble of blurred colors as Dylan took his phone back. He looked exasperated but in a fond way.   
“Sorry, Con, Marns is an untrustworthy sneak.” 

 

“No worries.” He paused. Dylan hadn’t called him. He thought he should offer to hang up, but Dylan was smiling at him and relaxing back into his couch. He watched Dylan bite his lip a little before he spoke again. “I can let you go back to hanging out.” 

 

“He was just texting you and talking about texting you anyway,” he heard Mitch say. He watched Dylan give Mitch a look before Dylan directed his attention back to Connor. 

 

“Sorry - I don’t wanna be rude or anything. I can call you tonight though? You still staying up ungodly late?” 

 

Connor smiled. He liked that already Dylan knew things about him, even if they were as inconsequential as his sleep schedule. “Yeah, yeah.” 

 

Dylan smiled, and Connor could hear Mitch in the background groaning. I was good to see his face, even for a little bit. 

 

\--

 

  
  
Dylan called him just after ten. It seemed almost early for a Saturday when Dylan had clearly been hanging out with friends. Connor was already in bed, watching TV on his laptop. His mom was home and in the family room watching some dumb bland sitcom and cross stitching with Ella Mae on her feet, and Connor was catching up on The Americans. He was more than happy to pause in order to answer Dylan’s FaceTime request.

 

Dylan was also in bed, the lighting weird because only one lamp was on. Still, this felt like some next level shit — seeing Dylan in his bed, his blanket wrapped around him, a soft white t-shirt covering his shoulders. His hair was a disorganized mop like it always seemed to be, and Connor ran through scenarios of how good it would smell. 

 

“Hey again,” he said, voice low because it was too dark to speak any louder. His mom was floors away. No one would hear him. Speaking softly seemed like the only option. 

 

“Connor McDavid,” Dylan said, sleepy smile easy on his face. 

 

“You skip out on Mitch early?” Connor asked, because it seemed like he could ask that. 

 

“Marns had to go to one of his million part-time jobs anyway. It worked out.” 

 

“Friend from high school or college?” 

 

“High school. Or, before high school. Like, first grade. We’re only still friends because he’s a bigger fuck up than I am.” 

 

“What, is he a big enough fuck up to live with his mom still?” 

 

“Ha ha,” Dylan said. “He just does not at all share society’s general values set for human adult contributors. Especially if you grew up white and kinda well off…he was one of the very few kids from my graduating class who didn’t go to college. He’s pursuing an acting career. Or at least structuring his life around acting opportunities.” 

 

“It works for some people.” 

 

“Wouldn’t work for me,” Dylan said. “How was your first weekend of not being able to work on your house?” 

 

“Some boy I met on the internet texted me all day, so it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.” 

 

“Some boy, huh? He sounds cute.” Dylan was hard to see in the lighting, but Connor thought he was blushing. 

 

“Yeah, he’s okay.” They’d entered into this tacit agreement that flirting was okay - flirting seemed to be the way that they always communicated. They were flirting, or they were having a heavy existential conversation. There didn’t seem to be much outside of that. Connor was just fine with that. 

 

It did make him nervous though. He thought it was so clear that he liked Dylan. He um, _liked_ him. Connor always thought he’d grow out of the high school nervousness around boys at some point, but a new crush now felt almost as debilitating as the crushes he’d had in high school. Though, come to think of it, it had been a while since he’d really had one. A real one. Not on an athlete or movie star. He’d been having pretty consistent feelings about wanting to meet Dylan, but he didn’t know how to bring it up. He’d never really had an internet friend before, especially one who was in easy driving distance. 

 

“You’re not so bad yourself, Connor McDavid.” Dylan liked his full name, apparently. He said it so proprietarily, like the words belonged in his mouth. 

 

“What are you doing tomorrow?” Connor asked, propping his phone against the pillow he wasn’t currently using and watched as Dylan did the same, pulling the blanket up over his shoulders. 

 

“I have to go into work.” 

 

“On a Sunday? Don’t you work in an office? Shouldn’t that be illegal?” 

 

“Yeah, it should be. I just need to catch up on some stuff before the week starts for real. What are you doing?”

 

“Probably trying not to go to Home Depot to visit my best friend Taylor. I dunno, my mom will probably rope me into going to a farmer’s market or a craft fair or something. She always says something like ‘This is why I had children. I thought this was why I got married, but as with everything, your father and I disagreed on that point.’ It’s okay, she usually buys me breakfast if we go to the farmer’s market. She’s all upset because Cam and I have been working Sundays, so I’m sure this one, Cam-free, will be a requirement.”

 

“That’s sweet. Your mom sounds adorable.” 

 

“Yeah, she’s pretty great. I wish she wasn’t my roommate, but she’s a good mom.”

 

They paused, the silence dark and comfortable. Connor sank deeper into his pillow. 

 

“I feel like all I’ve done for the past four days is talk to you,” Dylan said finally. 

 

“I can hang up if you want,” Connor said, suddenly self-conscious. Of course, he knew how much they’d been talking. But he loved it. 

 

“It’s been the best part of the last like, three months of my life, are you kidding me?” Dylan said. 

 

Connor laughed, the sound coming out staccato and nervous. “Ditto,” he said. 

 

“Sometimes you talk so quietly I can barely hear what you’re saying,” Dylan said, but it wasn’t an accusation. It almost felt like a compliment, honestly. 

 

“Sorry.” 

 

“Don’t be,” Dylan said. “If I’m putting effort into hearing someone speak, I’m more than pleased that it’s you.” 

 

Connor could only smile. 

 

“Hey, um, you can uh, totally say no to this, and I totally understand, no hard feelings or anything. I know the internet is a big weird place and everything,” Dylan, who was usually perfectly fine with being concise and direct, couldn’t spit his words out. 

 

“Yeah?” Connor encouraged. 

 

“You wanna get coffee somewhere tomorrow? I’ll probably be at work until two-ish? We could meet at a coffee shop on your side of town, if you wanted. If you don’t I get it, and you can totally say no, and I hope I didn’t just screw things up.” Dylan’s whole face was tense and he looked nervous enough to burst. 

 

“For real?” Connor said. He knew that when his smile stretched this big, it was just a display of his top teeth and the gums above them. He didn’t know how else to smile though. 

 

“I mean, not if you don’t want to.” 

 

“Fucking of course I want to,” Connor said, rolling his eyes. “You know where Modern Bean is?”

 

“Yeah, yeah. By that bread place.” 

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Two-thirty work for you? You’ll be able to get enough farmer’s marketing done?” 

 

“My mom is going to bust in my room at six sharp. We’ll be done before ten,” he said, rolling his eyes. 

 

“Perfect,” Dylan said, biting his lip a little. 

 

They kept talking until Dylan was clearly falling asleep again.


	4. Chapter 4

Dylan sat in his cube and worried. 

 

The crap he needed to get done was mostly data entry, so it didn’t even take his mind off of his date with Connor. Had he made it clear that it was a date? Did the fact that he hadn’t made it clear invalidate the date aspects of it? 

 

He was in shorts and a plain gray polo, and he spent at least forty minutes obsessing over whether he should leave work early so he could go home and change. He’d been listening to a podcast as he entered numbers for a forecast for one of their clients, and it ended before Dylan even noticed he’d been listening to someone tell a story. He was so useless. 

 

He got to the coffee shop early. It was a hiptster one. It had opened a little over a year ago, and they did the thing where they made each cup of coffee individually and it took forever. He would wait until Connor got there to order a drink so he could pay for them both. He didn’t get nervous for dates usually. Well, not this nervous. 

 

Connor walked in five minutes before their scheduled time and scanned the room for Dylan, hands twisting in front of him. Dylan savored the short seconds before Connor's eyes found him to bask in how cute he was. His hair was gelled up and back in that little swoop he usually had, and he looked like he was about to break his fingers off. When his eyes finally landed on Dylan though, he dropped his hands and smiled. 

 

“Hey,” he said, sliding into the chair across from Dylan. 

 

“Hey yourself. Let me buy you a drink?”

 

“Sure,” Connor said, blushing. When they stood there was a moment of awkwardness before Dylan pulled Connor into a little hug. Connor was shorter than him, and in the brief moment when they touched, Dylan figured out that Connor was the perfect height. He probably would have thought that no matter what, though. Connor just smiled. 

 

He bought Connor an iced coffee and got himself a smoothie. Too much caffeine would mean he’d spend their time together shaking even more than he had been before Connor walked in, and he didn’t want that. The table was a small square, and their knees touched beneath it, brushing casually together. Dylan didn’t shift away. 

 

“You’re cuter in person,” Dylan said. It got him the reaction he wanted: his cheeks turning rosy in a blush. His eyes were brighter, and Dylan could more easily see the smattering of acne on his jawline that made him look young. 

 

“You cut to the chase,” Connor said. It had been like the transition between texting to talking on the phone. Talking on the phone to FaceTiming. It was easy. 

 

Dylan shrugged. “How was the farmer’s market?” 

 

“I got crepes, so it was pretty good.” Connor sipped his coffee, and Dylan thought even that was cute. He needed to reel it in. “My mom decided to instigate a very parental kind of conversation about my future though, so that was a little rough.” 

 

“Yikes. When my parents have those with me, it’s usually ‘Dylan, when are you getting married? When are you having babies?’”

 

“Woah. That’s strong stuff. This was just about how I’m ‘currently aimless, going where the breeze takes me’ or something. The message, I think, was ‘I support this house building nonsense, but you need to get a job.’” Connor's smile was tiny, and betrayed how the conversation had made him feel for real. Like shit, clearly. 

 

Connor's arms were resting on the table, and Dylan reached for one of his hands with both of his, just sort of covering them for a second before Connor slowly tangled their fingers together. Dylan gave him a squeeze. 

 

“Figuring your shit out takes time,” Dylan said. “My parents always say things like ‘when I was your age we already had Ryan and a house and...blah blah.’ But they didn’t have student loan debt. They didn’t have such a competitive job market. Things weren’t as expensive, and they were earning more money to begin with. They met each other young. They both wanted to start a family right away.” 

 

Connor sighed and adjusted his grip on Dylan’s fingers. “That is exactly it. The fact that they still think that the world is the same. It was just kind of a downer, you know?” Dylan nodded. “And like, my brother is perfect, right? He’s got this crazy good job, and career ambition and all that shit. He even just kind of ended up with the perfect dog. And I just don’t have that.”

 

“Older brothers are the worst,” Dylan laughed. “Especially when they’re perfect.” 

 

“I think I do need to get a job though. Like, something temporary just until I’m done with this project. Just so I can make sure I can afford it, you know? Then after I’ll like, try to discover my calling or something.” Connor rolled his eyes. His hands were soft and warm and big, and Dylan was already feeling reluctant to ever let go. He swept his thumb across Connor's knuckles and got the smallest, shyest, sweetest smile in return. “Can you even believe I was nervous for this?” He said it like the nerves were the stupidest possible reaction to their coffee date. 

 

“Seems dumb now, right?” Dylan agreed. In middle school, he’d sat next to Alex in math class, and they were friends in about forty-five seconds, the awkwardness of ‘making’ a friend completely skipped. Dylan hadn’t ever had that again. There was always a ‘getting to know you’ phase where things were a little delicate and weird. But being with Connor felt like that instant friendship that had happened in sixth grade. It felt like he already knew Connor. 

 

They stayed in the coffee shop until it closed at six, then loitered in the parking lot talking for another forty-five minutes while they both pretended that they were about to leave. Dylan talked with his hands, and every time he would drop Connor's hand to gesture his emphasis, Connor's hands were always right where he left them, ready to be tangled together again. It was hard to think when he was touching Connor, but as soon as their contact broke, it was the only thing he could think about until they were touching again. Dylan wanted to touch him all over. He wanted to kiss the pout of his lips, and bury his face in the crook of his neck. 

 

Somehow he kept it together. When they finally couldn’t justify standing next to the driver’s side door of Connor's pickup, Dylan pulled him into a real hug, long and lingering, and promised to call before going to bed. 

 

Dylan watched as Connor's truck pulled out of the parking lot, and he finally let himself tip his forehead to his steering wheel and sigh. 

 

He felt a little crazy. He wanted to tell someone about how amazing his date was, and his first instinct was to call Connor. His internal eye roll at himself was the least of what he deserved.   
He pulled out of the parking lot and called Mitch.

 

“Dude, I met Connor,” he said when he picked up. He made an inquisitive little sound, and Dylan continued. “I think I want to marry him,” he said, knowing that it was a silly thing to say, but knowing that Mitch would pick up on the tone of his voice. 

 

“He as cute in person?” Mitch asked. 

 

“Cuter,” Dylan said. He got on the freeway back to his apartment and tried to figure out how he could possibly ever shut up about Connor ever again. His friends in college made sense again — how annoying they were when they started dating someone they were really into. Dylan hadn’t understood. He’d dated people he’d liked before, but he didn’t know that another person could spark the lightning inside of your chest that made your heart beat. He realized that every time he’d said ‘I love you’ before to anyone, he’d been lying. 

 

To Mitch’s credit, he listened to Dylan blather on about Connor as he missed his exit and had to take the long way back to his apartment. Dylan was already thinking about the next time he could see Connor, ask him about his day. He wanted to scratch up his neck and into his hair. He wanted to sink his teeth into Connor's bare shoulder. He pulled into the parking garage and shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. 

 

They were completely fogged with Connor. He couldn’t make himself upset about it.

 

\--

 

 

Connor's job search was short and pathetic. He wallowed in his own self-pity all Monday, spent three hours on FaceTime with Dylan that night, and came up with a plan. He was just going to go...get a job. 

 

Dylan’s perfect idea was to get a job at Home Depot. That had been his first stop that morning, but the manager said they had already hired their summer help a few weeks before. Connor could see the rest of his summer flash before his eyes: the jobs he was looking for being taken by high school and college students. He texted Dylan his woes and got an encouraging message back. _Keep your chin up, beautiful. What about a local hardware store?_

 

Connor sat in his truck with his phone in his hands thinking about how smart Dylan was. He was still thinking about the way Dylan’s hands felt in his during their date on Sunday. Handholding had never felt that important before. He’d focus on getting a job for the rest of the day, and that night he’d make another date to see Dylan. That would be his reward.   
He drove to the local hardware store in the downtown area of Newmarket. He hadn't been there since the Home Depot moved in when he was a teenager, but it looked the same to him.  There was a Now Hiring sign in the window, and Connor almost cried. 

 

It was a small store in a strip mall, jam-packed with a million little things, lawn mowers hanging from the walls, sale signs hand painted. It smelled different from Home Depot. Home Depot smelled like new things. Wayne’s Hardware smelled like everything had lived in a cardboard box in a basement for a few years before being put on the floor to be sold. Connor had worn a nice polo shirt and khakis, and he felt at least a little put together as he approached the older man behind the counter. 

 

“Hi, I’m Connor McDavid. I was wondering if you were hiring.” He held his hand out, and the older man shook it. 

 

“I’m Wayne,” he said, his gruff, worn face looking a little friendlier. “I’m afraid to tell you that we’re only looking for help during weekday mornings and afternoons. It would only be part-time.” 

 

“That sounds exactly what I’m looking for,” Connor said, face breaking into a smile. 

 

“You might get your nice clothes a little dirty,” Wayne said with a smile. “You think you could handle that?” 

 

“Yes, sir.” 

 

“Let me grab something from the office,” he said, leaving Connor to his own devices. He played with a mini tape measurer that was in the impulse-buy section of the cash wrap as he looked around the store. It had a kind of character that Home Depot didn’t have. Not that a store needed character, but he thought it would be nice to work someplace that wasn’t a warehouse. When Wayne came back, he tossed a red polo over Connor's shoulder, the same one he was currently wearing. 

 

“You’ll come back tomorrow at nine, and we’ll fill out your paperwork and get you started, alright kid?” 

 

“I’ll be here,” Connor said. He was elated. 

 

He should have just texted or something. He knew Dylan was at work. But as soon as he got back in his truck he called him. He was more excited than he really should have been to get a part-time job. He was a little surprised that he picked up. 

 

“Hey, you okay?” He asked, voice quiet. Dylan didn’t like the people that he worked with to know anything about his life. 

 

“I got a job at the hardware store,” he said. He tried to sound normal, but he couldn’t. 

 

“Are you for real? I’m so happy for you. You wanna go out to celebrate? My treat?” 

 

Connor was buzzing. He didn’t feel any closer to figuring out his life, but it had been too long since two nice things had happened to him in the same day. Yes, he knew how pathetic that sounded. 

 

“Yes, I want to go celebrate. When?” 

 

“Tonight? I get off work at five.” 

 

“Yes yes,” Connor said, blushingly excited. 

 

Dylan picked the restaurant, a nice pizza place that made fancy pizzas and brewed their own beer. If Dylan kept being this way, Connor was pretty sure he’d blurt the L word out way too soon. He cellyed in his car a little before hanging up with Dylan, who had to get back to his spreadsheets. 

 

\--

 

  
Dylan was in his work clothes when Connor met him at the pizza place. He’d been waiting outside for him, his tie loose and his shirt unbuttoned at the neck. He wrapped Connor in a hug as soon as he saw him, mumbling congratulations into his neck. Connor squeezed him back, knowing that he was looking at Dylan with hearts in his eyes. He’d had a good day, but seeing Dylan made it a great day.

 

They were seated in a booth that was ready for them when Connor showed up. It was a pizza place, but Dylan had apparently made a reservation. Dylan held his hand all to way to their table, tangling their fingers and looking back at him with a little blush high on his cheeks. 

 

“The Greek pizza here is really good, if you’re into feta,” Dylan said. “Or the barbecue chicken is solid.” 

 

Connor could only grin at him over his menu. 

 

“Hey, mister gainfully employed. I’m proud of you for going out and getting a job that makes sense to you.” 

 

“As happy as I am about it I still feel like...I got a university degree, and I’m going to be working part-time at a hardware store.” 

 

“But you don’t want to work in an office, right?” Dylan had told Connor about how much he hated his job. How he hated that he had to have ‘work clothes,’ and how he hated the culture of stepping on each other’s backs to climb the corporate ladder. He hated the meetings, and the careful language, and how he could see himself easily spending the next twelve years of his life there before he even really realized it — if they ever hire him permanently. Connor didn’t want to touch that life with a ten-foot pole. 

 

“There’s always this gap between what I want and what I feel like I should want, though. You know?” 

 

“That’s the crux of all my problems,” Dylan said. They ordered beers and pizza, and Connor picked at the label of his beer bottle. “The weight of expectation. I think you should be happy about getting what you want. Too many people go through life making the choices they think they should be making, instead of making the choices that they want to make. That’s why I think your house is so cool. It’s clearly the decision you’re making for yourself to make you happy, instead of the ‘right choice,’ which, I don’t even know what that would be.”

 

“The right choice would probably be going back to school to become a teacher or something. It’s been constantly reiterated to me that teaching is what my history degree is for, or something like that.”

 

“But you don’t want to teach.” 

 

“Not children at least,” Connor said. “I would only want to teach people who were interested in learning, which...narrows the classroom I’d want to have to pretty much a fictional place. Narnia.” 

 

“Knowing what you don’t want is important. I don’t even know what I don’t want, outside of my job now.” 

 

“Do you want to travel?” Connor asked this carefully. It seemed like everyone his age was jerking off to the thought of going overseas for a while, traipsing around in different countries. Seeing the world. He was constantly reminded by his peers that This Was The Time To Travel, and anyone not doing it was making a choice to ruin their lives. Especially if they were single. Connor could travel. He had some money saved up. If he planned carefully it wouldn’t have to be exuberantly expensive. But he wanted his money to go into his house. That was his priority. His kind of traveling was always more along the lines of camping anyway. 

 

“Don’t know where I’d go. Don’t know who I’d go with. I’d rather go like, camping or something than to Australia.” 

 

Connor laughed. He’d just been thinking the same thing. “Totally. We could go camping if you wanted.” He felt almost too forward saying it, but he knew Dylan was interested in him. It was blatantly obvious. There was fire between them, the tiny spark from their first YouTube messages growing quickly. He felt like it was a blaze that could consume a prairie. 

 

“Fuck yes,” Dylan said, hooking an ankle around Connor's under the table. 

 

“We could go when Cam has another weekend he can’t help build the house,” Connor suggested. Connor hadn’t spent one night with Dylan. They hadn’t even kissed. But they were already planning how they would spend the summer together. And it felt right. 

 

Their pizza came, and Connor had to struggle through how hungry he was versus how much he wanted to just talk to Dylan. He could feel Dylan’s ankle, warm on his own.   
Connor was on his second beer when he suggested it. It wasn’t a beer induced idea. He’d been thinking about it since Sunday, but maybe the beer and a half helped him get some courage up.

 

“Do you wanna come over this weekend and maybe see the house?” His words came out quick and solid, and he watched Dylan as he took a moment to decipher what Connor had said to him. 

 

“Cam’s going to be there, right? You’re raising the walls?” Dylan leaned toward him, the two inches he had left of his beer grasped between both hands. 

 

“Yeah. Saturday we’ll build them, Sunday we’ll raise them, I hope. That’s the plan at least, if we don’t fuck anything up.” 

 

“Could I help? I’ve never built anything before, but I’d be an extra set of hands at least.” 

 

It was the best possible response. He hadn’t wanted Dylan to feel like he had to help, but he seemed excited. He’d always been enthusiastic about Connor's house from the start, even when he casually mentioned his claustrophobia. Connor was a little nervous about that, but his house was still just a little flat trailer. Nothing to be uncomfortable about yet at least. 

 

He tried to be cool when he accepted Dylan’s offer of help, but he also almost choked on his own spit. Dylan just looked at him like he’d won the clumsy dumb Canadian boy lottery though.

 

\--

 

 

The drive to Newmarket wasn’t bad on a Saturday morning. Dylan was so used to taking the train everywhere that he almost forgot how much he liked driving. He picked up coffee on the way — even one for Cam because Dylan desperately wanted Connor's older brother to like him — and arrived at seven, like Connor said he should. He parked behind a little black Audi, but he recognized Connor's truck in the driveway — and the trailer — and texted him that he was there. 

 

Connor looked gleeful like a little boy when he saw Dylan, his hair golden and back, his smile teeth-and-gums wide. Connor's smile was dorky and not traditionally attractive, but damn it did something to Dylan. He was afraid he’d find himself doing crazy things to make Connor look like that as much as possible. 

 

“You’re my favorite person on planet earth,” he announced when Dylan held the coffee out to him. “Is this one for Cam?” He asked. “Not to presume, of course.” 

 

“Yeah, yeah it’s for Cam,” Dylan said. He remembered how easy meeting Connor had been, and he tried to convince himself that he shouldn’t feel as nervous to meet his brother. 

 

“Damn, he’s going to love you.”

Dylan woke up this early every day. He woke up by default at six am now, because he was a grownup and he hated it. He was glad to be alert now though. “Don’t worry,” Connor told him, taking his hand and leading him inside the house to the kitchen. “My mom is running errands. I think she’ll be at the nursery all morning, and will be working on the back garden when she comes back, so you don’t have to meet her right away.”

 

He followed Connor into the kitchen, where Cam was sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal in his hands, a copy of the plans spread out on the table in front of him. He shook Dylan’s hand when Connor introduced them, and looked like he could kiss Dylan when he gave him the coffee. The little golden retriever was laying under Cam’s chair, and her tail started wagging the second Dylan walked into the room. 

 

“I like him,” Cam said to Connor. “Older brother approved. This is Ella Mae, my southern belle.” He explained that she’d been dropped off at a kill shelter in Alabama and had been driven up to Toronto by a rescue. 

 

Dylan smiled at the way Connor's blush reached the tips of his ears, how he kicked at Cam’s legs under the table as they all sat down to talk about what they were going to try to get done that day. 

 

It was clear to Dylan that Connor had never done this before, but he took charge of their little breakfast meeting after pouring himself and Dylan identical bowls of cereal. Dylan had already eaten, but he was also sort of always hungry, so he wasn’t going to turn it down. Connor talked between bites of his cereal, and they all crowded around one side of the table to watch a YouTube video on the strong-tie DDTIZ hold downs they were going to use to anchor the walls to the trailer. Cam had a list of all of the lengths of wood they would need for framing and was numbering it to correlate with the plans they had on paper.   
  
They walked out to the circle drive where the trailer was sitting, looking innocuous and plain. The view from the driveway was a sweet little ‘60s neighborhood of mostly single-story houses. Half of them had been updated, and you could pick out the ones that were easily. Connor's wasn’t one of them. It was a little red brick rambler, with slitted windows and skinny poles that framed the garage doors. It was a sharp contrast to Dylan’s parents’ house, in their standard recent development, 90’s construction, young trees. The houses in Dylan’s neighborhood were three-garage, two-story foyer monstrosities that Dylan was pretty sure could fit into the “McMansion” framework. Connor's house was cozy and lived in, but the bathroom in the basement was still completely mint green. It felt more personal than Dylan’s house, which Dylan could see echoes of through his own neighborhood. His house felt like home. Connor's house felt homey. 

 

It was almost strange to see the trailer in person. To see this thing that he’d found basically on a carefully designed accident on the internet. The trailer was where Connor was during their first phone call, which had seemed like such a long time ago, but was generously only a week and a half ago. Connor already felt like part of his life.

 

“We rearranged the garage a little to do the sawing and stuff. This was 'my stall,' I guess,” he said as he punched in the code to open the garage door. The walls were piled thick with sports equipment hanging off of hooks. There was a ride on lawn mower parked between the two stalls. The rest of Connor's stall was filled with a Skilsaw and a pile of lumber.

 

“Cam and I kinda have a rhythm going, cutting these together. But maybe you could keep track of the ones that we have and still need to do?” He handed Dylan the list Cam had made and a carpenter’s pencil. He wasn’t in charge of any of the actual sawing, but he felt like he was being helpful. It was the first time he’d held a carpenter’s pencil in his life. 

 

It was still early, not even eight when they’d started sawing. Dylan was labeling the different part of the lawn that was reasonably flat. By ten, Dylan felt like they had gotten a lot of things done. There was a pile of scrap wood in the corner of the garage, and they were all a little sweaty from the effort. 

 

“I think the blade is getting dull,” Cam said, poking at the circular saw blade. “I have no idea how old it is, but it shouldn’t have to take that much effort to get through a two-by-four.” 

 

“Do we need a new blade?” Connor asked. 

 

“I think so,” Cam said. “Hard to tell by the way it looks. I’m going to head up to Home Depot, see what they say. You guys can scope the plan. Get some snacks or something.” 

 

Cam was not subtle about the look that he gave Connor as he headed to his car with the blade in his hand. He opened the passenger door for Ella Mae, and she climbed in and laid down like that seat belonged only to her. 

 

“I don’t think there’s actually very much we can get done without the saw blade,” Connor said. It wasn’t too hot out, but Connor's cheeks were flushed, and his shirt was sticking to him a little bit. He sat on the edge of his trailer, and Dylan sat down next to him, plans still in hand. Connor laughed, and folded the plans up, slipping them into his back pocket. When he sat back down, he sat closer to Dylan, their thighs touching. 

 

“Thanks for letting me come out here today,” Dylan said. “This feels like actual work. I might be too tired to go into my real job Monday.” Connor laughed and slipped his hand into Dylan’s. They were both a little gross and dirty, but Connor's hand felt as good as it always did in his own. Connor tipped his head onto Dylan’s shoulder, and it was all over for Dylan. He’d wanted to kiss Connor since the first time they’d talked on the phone, when the spark between them felt real and big and dangerous. It had never been something he could ignore. 

 

He turned a little more toward Connor, forcing Connor to look up at him. He looked shy and sweet, and Dylan didn’t want anything else in the whole world other than this boy. Their kiss was sweet and slow, and it was easy when their bodies melted together, when Connor's arms came up around his neck, when his own hands found Connor's hips, his back. 

 

Their kiss stayed sweet and light, and they had to pause when Connor was smiling too big to keep kissing him. Dylan had hoped it would feel this good. It was a tingle that went through his whole body, and when they finally broke apart, breathing a little hard, Connor tipped his forehead onto Dylan’s shoulder, and Dylan pulled him tight against him. 

 

“We’re in agreement that this is amazing, right?” Dylan asked, his nose buried in Connor's hair. It smelled as good as he’d thought it would, like shampoo and sweat and Connor and whatever gel he’d used to make it do the swoopy thing. He pressed a kiss into Connor's hair and felt him sigh against his collarbone. 

 

“Yeah, I think we’re solidly in agreement,” Connor said. “However, Cam said something about snacks, and I thoroughly support that movement. You hungry?” 

 

Dylan followed Connor back to the kitchen, realizing that maybe he’d follow Conor anywhere. Connor got stuff out for sandwiches, but instead of actually making them, Dylan pressed him into the pantry door and kissed him again. And again. 

 

When Cam came back with a new saw blade, he found them in the kitchen, Connor on Dylan’s lap, sharing a sandwich. Dylan watched as Connor blushed under the weight of his brother’s presence, but Cam just sat down like nothing was weird, smiled at Connor, and grabbed the bag of chips from the middle of the table. 

 

“Should we get the rest of the boards cut out?” He asked, and they all headed back down to the shed. Cam and Connor watched a YouTube video on how to change the saw blade, and when they got back up and running, Cam sighed in relief. 

 

“It’s like butter now,” he said. “Glad I went to get a new one.” But he also knocked his shoulder into Connor's in the extremely unsubtle way he’d been all morning.   
Dylan was glad that Cam was just as easy to like as he’d seemed on camera, and as Connor had described him. 

 

They only got one wall nailed together, secured, square and plumb before Cam tapped out. They’d been working for almost eight hours, and Connor, who was enthusiastic, but still new to this kind of hard work, was grateful to have a reason to call it quits. 

 

\--

 

 

Cam took off immediately, but Connor convinced Dylan to stay for a beer. Dylan had met his mom when she’d come home from the nursery with a truck bed full of plants, before she dragged them down to the back garden on a snow sled. It was embarrassing to have to introduce the boy you like to your mom right away because there’s no other choice. Because Connor didn’t have anywhere else to invite Dylan back to. He didn’t have a space of his own. 

 

That night though, they sat in the basement and Connor's mom texted him that they wouldn’t bug them. With a winky face emoji. Connor kind of wanted to die, but at least she was less obvious than Cam had been all day. 

 

“Holy shit that is a lot of hard work,” Dylan said, collapsing onto the couch. The basement was nice. Not only because it was air-conditioned but also because it was dark, the perfect salve to a long hot day working in the sun. It was a finished space outside of Connor's bedroom, which his mom had always encouraged to be his and Cam’s space when they were teenagers. His mom really only came into the basement to do laundry or get something out of the storage room. There was at least some semblance of privacy. Connor sat down next to him, and let Dylan sag into his side. 

 

“And now we’re pleasantly behind schedule, which is what always seems to happen to the people on TV. It’s like we’re professionals too.” 

 

Dylan laughed. “You guys are going to do that every weekend through the whole summer?” 

 

“Well, when we get to a point where I can do some of the stuff myself, I’m sure I’ll work on it through the week too.” 

 

“Where did you get this work ethic? I think I’m feeling discouraged from one day.” 

 

“It’s the thing I want,” Connor said simply. Connor had his fair share of apathy in his life lately, but when he really wanted something, it was easy to work hard for it. When he didn’t care about something, that’s when the real challenge kicked in. 

 

“I wish I had something in my life like that,” Dylan said. It was quiet, in the kind of voice Connor usually only heard over the phone late at night. Dylan’s confession voice. 

 

“Well, what do you like?” Connor asked, wrapping an arm around Dylan’s shoulders. Dylan tucked his face into Connor's neck.

 

“I like you,” Dylan said. It was the kind of statement that would have normally made Connor feel like he was going to burst with happiness. Instead, it made his heart hurt for Dylan. 

 

“I like you too, Dyls,” he said, kissing the top of his head. It was so easy to be with him, like it never was with Connor and anyone else. Even his friends he’d had forever. There always seemed to be a gap between them. Not with Dylan. “What do you like to do?” 

 

Dylan heaved a sigh. “I like to watch the YouTube videos no one else has watched,” he said. “I like the moment I get out of work. How that moment means I have the longest amount of time during the week to not have to be at work. I like going grocery shopping because it helps me feel mindlessly productive for a little while. I like talking to you.” 

 

“We’re going to figure it out, alright? We’ll find the thing you want to spend your time on, alright?” Connor had been so happy all day. He had Dylan here. Dylan had kissed him finally. His brother clearly approved of his choice. They’d had a lot of fun together, the three of them, working on the next step of his house. He just wanted Dylan to feel that way too. That glow of getting something done with the people you like the most. 

 

“Yeah?” Dylan asked. He tilted his head up toward Connor. Something on his face was raw and open, and Connor mumbled an ‘of course,’ before dipping to kiss him. 

 

It had been minutes since their last kiss, and already Connor felt hungry for it again. He pressed Dylan back into the couch, flat on his back, and shivered when Connor's hands came up to steady his hips, to slip up his back to his shoulders. When he pulled away enough to check in with him, Dylan looked happy again. Connor's heart was beating fast in his chest, and he could feel that Dylan’s was doing the same. 

 

Connor wanted everything from him. They clicked immediately. It didn’t feel like the kind of situation where he needed to wait around to see if Dylan was interested or worthy. But it did feel like the kind of situation where they should go slow for other reasons. Connor felt...fragile around Dylan. Like Dylan had more power than Connor was used to because Connor had cared about him so instantly. 

 

He kissed Dylan once more before snuggling down on his chest, nuzzling against his collarbone. He let Dylan choose something on Netflix, and barely realized what they were watching as Dylan stroked through his hair and absently scratched between his shoulder blades.

 

“I’m falling asleep,” Dylan said after a while, voice scratchy above him. Connor was warm and content and really didn’t want to move. 

 

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” he whined. 

 

“I should probably head out,” he said. He held Connor closer for a second. “I don’t want to...I dunno. Overstay my welcome.” 

 

“You’d be welcome at any hour,” Connor said automatically. He propped himself up on his forearms so he could look up at Dylan. “But yeah. We should maybe take this slow.” 

 

Dylan nodded. “Not that I want to,” he joked. 

 

“Word,” Connor said, trying to carefully get up off the couch without jabbing any joints into Dylan. He walked with Dylan to his car and happily spent a good amount of time saying goodbye. Dylan couldn’t come back the next day because he had extra hours at work, and family dinner. He realized that not knowing when he’d see Dylan again made his heart ache. 

 

“Can I see you during the week at some point?” He blurted it out when Dylan had already climbed into his Jetta and rolled the window down to say goodbye one more time. It was like one of them was going off to the war, for god’s sake. 

 

“Fucking yes,” Dylan said. “Come over to mine?” 

 

There was no scenario in any universe that would have caused Connor to say no to that.


	5. Chapter 5

Dylan’s desk was covered in post-its. Some of them were work-related, sure. But a lot of them were personal. 

 

If you had asked Dylan Strome when he was nineteen how he felt about personal affirmations, he would have scoffed. Twenty-four-year-old Dylan Strome had a lot of post-its with a lot of stupid sayings on them. Hey, people can change, alright?

 

He was only going to spend a couple hours at work. He knew that putting in a couple hours on a Sunday could make the rest of his week go so much better. He’d at least get to prep for the Monday Morning Meeting, or MMM, which was an abbreviation that Dylan found suffocatingly lame. He always wondered if anyone in management was actually on board with that bullshit too, or if there were so many corporate parameters that they just had to be okay with the crap that their original thoughts had been distilled into. 

 

Dylan was mindlessly going through emails. If he had been a permanent employee, he would have had a laptop, and he could do this from home. Though the second they hire you, there are Real Expectations, and even though the benefits that came along with that would have been welcome, Dylan didn’t really want expectations. He didn’t want to be promoted to some dumb middle management position. He wanted to stay invisible for as long as possible.

 

He had a stack of post-its by his keyboard, and every once in a while he’d pause for a moment and write down something that made him happy. Something that existed outside of work, and made spending the hours in that office worth it. Somedays it was a struggle. Some days he could barely muster more than “Game of Thrones.” 

 

Today the first thing at the top of his post-it was CONNOR, in block caps, which made him feel silly but was still true. He had ‘family dinner,’ and ‘the Leafs - god knows why.’ He had his easy relationship with his roommate, the baby that was about to pop out of Megan at any given moment. He had spaghetti carbonara and mac and cheese. 

 

He looked at the clock on his computer. If he left now, he’d be early to his parents’ place. But, well, it was just his parents’ house. He’d set the table or vacuum the living room or something. Make his folks glad he showed up early. 

 

He looked down at the list of things that made him happy and wrote CONNOR again. 

 

\--

 

  
“And what’s so important that you feel the need to text while you’re at the dinner table,” Dylan’s mom asked him. He hadn’t even realized he’d been doing it. It’s like the world around him went a little fuzzy and dark when Connor texted him. He had complete tunnel vision.

 

“Nothing,” Dylan lied, slipping his phone back into his pocket. He’d make an excuse soon to go to the bathroom, where he could let Connor know he wouldn’t be able to respond as quickly until he got home. 

 

“That’s not nothing. Look at your smile, Dyls! Your lil blush!” Megan was the person he thought he’d talk to the most about relationships if he was the kind of person who had relationships with girls. 

 

“It’s nothing,” he insisted. But then his mom caught on. She raised an eyebrow. 

 

“Are you seeing someone? Because you haven’t mentioned anyone. What does he do? Do I know his parents?” 

 

“This is why I didn’t want to talk about it, for the record.” 

 

“So there is someone,” Megan said like she’d solved a murder. 

 

“You guys don’t get to gang up on me. You haven’t dated anyone new in ten years. Not everyone gets married in high school.” 

 

“We got married after college,” Ryan said, like Dylan had actually forgotten the timeline of events. 

 

“Practically high school.” He sighed and gave in. Realistically, he thought, he’d be bringing Connor over for Canada Day. He hoped. “His name is Connor, he’s very handsome, he works at a hardware store, you don’t know his parents.” 

 

“And how did you-” his mom started. 

 

“That will be the end of questions, thank you very much. Megan, please tell us everything about your pregnancy.” It was a little sarcastic, but it worked. Plus he dodged the “met on the internet” bullet. He wondered how Connor felt about that. If he’d be cool with agreeing to a made up story for the sake of both of their shame. 

 

“Well, everyone knows that I’m a whale and I can’t fit into any of my shoes anymore,” Megan started. She was to the angry part of her pregnancy instead of the glowing happy part, and Dylan could finally relate to her again. 

 

Thank god.   


 

\--

 

 

"Read them with feeling, Dyl," Mitch said, his script open in his hands as he stumbled over the Shakespeare he was trying to memorize for an audition.

 

"I'm like, criminally bad at this," Dylan complained. He was more than happy to help him learn his lines, but Dylan wasn't born for acting. He had no idea what he was born for.

 

"You're useless, Strome," he complained. His house was loud around them, roommates coming and going. Mitch's house always reminded Dylan of the shithole he'd live in when he was in college. A mishmash of furniture, dirt in the corners of their old, worn hardwood. The house itself was turn-of-the-century and made out of rooms that didn't fit together in any discernible way; little tight pockets of useless space everywhere.

 

But Mitch's roommates weren't dirty college boys. They were adults. They were the slightly dirty vagabonds that refused to get office jobs. They were the people cooking your tempeh at the vegan cafe. They were the pack of cyclists you passed on the highway never knowing they had quit their jobs to go on a cross-country bike trip just because they wanted to. Because they didn't live expensive lives. Because the thought of an office job gave them a tightness in their chests that helped them steer clear of Dylan's particular brand of misery. These were Mitch's roommates.

 

Dylan took a breath. "To be or not to be - " he started.

 

"Asswipe. I’m trying out for Macbeth here. Stay on the same play at least."

 

Dylan tossed the book down. "How do you survive doing this?" His desperation in his voice made her face go all soft and annoying.

 

"The artist's life?" Mitch asked.

 

"Yeah. Living in this dirty house so you can act."

 

"Well, acting isn't like writing or painting or gardening. You can't really do it on your own and in your own time, whenever your heart desires. And I'm going to do this always. It's the kind of thing that's non-optional for me — like exercising a puppy. Exercise the puppy or it will destroy everything you love. So I have to commit to someone else's schedule because that's mandatory. And I have to listen to the director. And I have to spend time with people I don't like. But up on stage, feeling a character flow through me — that's where the magic's at. And in the cracks, I work enough weird jobs to afford my room here and not much else. That’s how I exercise my puppy."

 

"Sounds awful," Dylan said, both as a joke and as his truth. Mitch had what he wanted and it made Dylan's skin crawl.

 

"Well, your job sounds like a treat too," he spat back.

 

"Everyone deserves their own personal hell, right? At least that's what OfficeTemps lets you think."

 

"You could be unemployed like your boy."

 

“He’s not unemployed anymore. He got a job at a hardware store.”

 

"The thing I like about your Mr. McDavid is that he runs from what makes him sad, and toward what makes him happy. Aka that weird house. And you, I guess."

 

"Never complained about that part."

 

"Not saying you were. Just saying, you fell for a weirdo free spirit who wants to drive his house around. That reflects on you."

 

"Shut up, Marns," he said, thinking that one over. Connor had always been just stupid magnetic to him. Like Connor wasn't a choice. Mitch rolled up his lines and thwaped Dylan on the nose. "Okay, you're too dumb for Shakespeare, I get it. At least give me some feedback on my monologue."

 

\--

 

 

There were so many things about Aaron that Connor had a hard time reconciling. He’d grown up down the street from Aaron. He was a grade above Connor, but they’d always been friends. They’d always found time to play street hockey, or shinny when Aaron’s parents put up their backyard rink. 

 

Aaron had always been taller and blonder and better looking than Connor. He had a full smile of perfect, straight teeth, and had gone to school for finance. He was currently rolling in it, Connor was sure. Way more than part-time at a hardware store in the very, very least. 

 

Still, the kid was maddeningly Canadian. Always polite and gracious. When Connor's mom had told Aaron’s mom about Connor's house, he’d texted and offered help. 

 

It was impossible to hate Aaron, because while he was everything that Connor was sure he was supposed to strive for, he was also just a nice guy and a good friend. Connor couldn’t hate him. He could only harbor ugly jealous feelings that wrapped his soul tighter and tighter until he thought his insides might burst. 

 

Still, he was really good with a nail gun, and Connor respected that. 

 

He’d set up his phone on a box, framing out a shot of their entire workspace, and turned on a time-lapse app. He’d used it the day before to very cool effect, and he was excited to cut his video for the week, even if he hadn’t yet figured out how to actually get the time-lapse footage into the video editing app. Surely there was a way. 

 

“It’s lucky it didn’t rain,” Cam said, examining the wood they’d left laid out overnight. It was fine. It was all fine. But it was a little dewy.

 

“I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s all nicely labeled,” Aaron said, looking at the framed out walls that he and Mitch and Dylan had constructed the day before.

 

“Connor's buddy Dylan did that yesterday,” Cam said. Connor shot him dagger eyes, and Aaron caught on easily. Cam could never be a spy. He could never handle any kind of covert mission. He was useless. 

 

“Your buddy, huh?” 

 

“This guy I’ve kind of been seeing, I guess.” 

 

“Connor loves him.” 

 

“Is this fourth grade? Cool it,” Connor snapped, a little too harsh. 

 

"Alright, kid. Sorry," Cam said, patting his shoulder. He would have been within his rights to call him an asshole, which he was fully being, but he didn't. 

 

"Sorry," he sighed. "Yeah, I really like Dylan," he said. It came out all serious after the snap, but he felt protective of Dylan. He felt protective of his feelings for Dylan. 

 

"If you don't want to talk about him, you don't have to," Aaron said. He might have been embarrassed about losing his cool in front of Aaron, but they had known each other forever. He'd seen Aaron annoyed and grumpy too. He saw Aaron yell at his mom once. 

 

"I kind of just want to talk about him all the time, is the problem," Connor said, trying to keep his gushing to a minimum while he talked about how quickly it seemed like they had gotten to know each other, how easy his feelings for Dylan had been. Aaron talked about the girl he'd started dating a few months ago, and how she's probably not the one, but he likes her a lot just the same. Connor didn't know what that even meant. If he'd already found out that the person he was with wasn't the person he wanted to spend his life with, why was he bothering? He couldn't figure out a polite way to ask that question though, so he moved on. Cam was, as usual, seeing no one. Connor thought Cam would be the kind of person who suddenly just met the person he was going to marry, and bring her home with a ring on her finger. He had always been a little cagey about dating. 

 

Aaron wasn't any kind of a professional, but he'd done a couple charity building projects on his company's annual volunteer days, and having him there helped arguably more than having Dylan there — though it obviously helped to have all the sections put together already.

 

Connor thought of Dylan constantly throughout the day. They hadn't been texting much. Connor's phone was spoken for, hooked up to a tri-pod and a back-up battery, and Dylan had a busy-ish day. They'd talked that morning. Dylan had woken up early to catch Connor before he got started for the day, and then had gone back to bed. Connor could tell that he was sleepy when he called, and not a whole lot of meaningful conversation went on, but he was glad to hear Dylan's voice for a couple minutes. 

 

They got the walls up before dinner, and Connor took them out to eat as a thank you for all the hard work they had put in. 

 

"Shit, I feel like I work hard every day, but that is a different kind of hard work there," Aaron said as the server put their plates down in front of them. Connor shouldn't be spending too much money on crap like this; going out to eat at a real restaurant. But he was employed. He had savings. He'd just have to be smart about budgeting. He'd start a spreadsheet when he got home. "It was nice to be outside though, making something. You'll let me know when you need a third set of hands again, yeah?"

 

“You might regret making that offer,” Connor said, thinking about how nice it would be to have someone willing (and tall) to help out on hard parts of the project.

 

“Good to remember that I can create things that aren’t ideas or digital files, you know?” Aaron said and got into his Infinity. Connor looked at his own very used Ford pickup.

 

He wasn’t sure exactly when he and Aaron had diverged, They had been such similar little blonde kids, had gone to the same school and played on the same hockey team. They had been raised in the same neighborhood. Yet Aaron turned out normal, and at some point, Connor had gotten a little…defective. 

 

\--

 

 

Dylan felt like he spent the first couple days of his week twiddling his thumbs. He hadn't realized how much he'd been relying on Connor's stagnant downtime to entertain him and make him happy at work. Connor had been doing long training days at the hardware store — at least longer than most of his shifts would be — so he could only text Dylan a couple times during the day. They did spend their lunches on the phone with each other. It wasn't particularly interesting to listen to Connor chew, but Dylan would have chosen it over anything else. 

 

Wednesday was the night that worked out the soonest for them to see each other again. Dylan had given Connor his address and had actually left work on time in order to be home when he arrived. He paced as he waited. He wasn't good at settling into a task when he was waiting. He was too anxious for that. 

 

Dylan had to focus on normal reactions when Connor got there. "You're a sight for sore eyes," he said straight into Connor's neck. He didn't think Connor had been in his apartment for a full second before they were pressed together, already wrapped up in each other. Dylan wished he could bottle the smell on him. It wasn't that it smelled particularly great or anything. It just smelled particularly _Connor_. 

 

After they'd gotten the requisite kissing out of the way, Dylan gave him the tour. 

 

"This place is like, cool. You have a cool apartment," Connor said, his hand loosely dangling in Dylan's. "You have a cool apartment and I live in my mom’s basement." 

 

"You're building your own house. I'm giving rent money away forever." Dylan shrugged. That's not what he wanted Connor to think by being here. "This is like, my whole paycheck pretty much. So it's not like I'm a rich person." 

 

"No, I know, that's not what I meant," Connor stuttered out, and Dylan realized they had reached their first awkward moment. It was weird for it to have come this late. 

 

"It's cool," Dylan said, smoothing Connor's frustrated frown away with his thumb and pressing a kiss to his lips. He couldn't honestly believe they were actually wasting their time together talking. He had no idea how people sustained relationships in long distance scenarios. Dylan would never last. "We just have different circumstances. It's not a big deal. My roommate is gone until probably nine thirty, so we could order some food and watch a movie?"

 

Dinner and a movie seemed inconsequential to Dylan. He wanted to like, fly Connor to Paris on a private jet to eat a ten-course meal, but takeout Thai would have to do. 

 

It was a relief to sit on the couch to pick something to watch while they waited for their food and have Connor immediately invading his space. The amount of time he spent wanting to press his face to Conor's bare skin was embarrassing, so it was nice to wrap his arm around Connor's shoulders and have him nuzzle into his collarbone. Nothing felt better than having his feelings reciprocated. 

 

"I like your apartment," Connor said a few minutes into cuddling and mindless sports talk on the TV. "I like that it's yours, and I like that I'm here with you, and I'm sorry I was a dick about it earlier."

 

"Hey, babe, don't worry about it," he said, combing through Connor's dirty blonde hair. He was less watching the TV and more watching the top of Connor's head. 

 

"I just feel like I'm constantly on guard. Constantly thinking about how far behind I am from everyone else."

 

"It's not a race." 

 

"Feels like one." 

 

"Yeah, it does." 

 

"I literally can't believe you're the only person I have to talk about this,” Connor said. “Like, how is this possible. I feel like every article I read online is about how millennials are struggling, but then I go on Facebook, and everyone has new houses and new jobs and I have..." 

 

"A new boyfriend?" Dylan asked, a hopeful quirk to his words. 

 

Connor tipped is head up to look at him. "Yeah?" He asked, that tooth-and-gums wide smile plastered on his face. Dylan kissed those little cheeks he got when he smiled that big and checked it off the list of things he desperately wanted to do for the first time. Though he added it to the list of things he wanted to do again a million times. 

 

"If you want me," Dylan said. 

 

"Duh," Connor said. Dylan got a smile with his eye roll though. 

 

Dylan learned how hard it was to eat Thai takeout with Connor still curled under his arm. He learned that Connor had no compunctions about eating out of Dylan’s carton, his chopsticks stealing a piece of broccoli as he gave Dylan a sneaky smile. 

 

They watched stand up comedy on TV that they only occasionally laughed at, and ignored their food on the coffee table in favor of distractedly making out.

 

Somehow Connor ended up in Dylan’s lap, and Dylan’s hands crept up the back of his shirt, fingers trying to memorize the warmth of Connor's skin. It’s not like he thought Connor was going anywhere. He just wanted those memories, the feelings he was feeling, to become a part of him.

 

“I like you,” Connor said into Dylan’s lips, his fingers playing with Dylan’s hair. It was getting longer, shaggier. It constantly looked on the verge of curling.

 

“I like you too,” Dylan said, smiling because Connor was being a little silly. He was looser than he was when he was building, or around Cam. He was lighter when they weren’t having deep talks. He was just Connor here in Dylan’s apartment, his knees on either side of Dylan’s hips, some middle-aged white guy on the TV behind him telling only sort of funny jokes.

 

“Do you want to see the footage from this weekend?” Connor asked. Dylan pushed him up and off of him so they could sit next to each other and watch on Connor's phone. It was just a couple clips, but Dylan was in the ones from Saturday. The footage was mostly of the pile of lumber getting smaller as they cut the right boards. The one from Sunday had a third person in them too, but Dylan was distracted by watching the walls getting raised that he didn’t ask right away. 

 

“Those look amazing,” Dylan said honestly. “That’s so fucking cool.” 

 

“The only issue is that I can’t figure out how to get the files from that one app to anywhere except Facebook or Instagram.” 

 

“Can I see?” Dylan asked, and started poking around a little bit. Connor hooked his chin over Dylan’s shoulder and distracted him by nuzzling a little at his neck. It was distracting. “You know what you’re doing,” he accused playfully. 

 

“Yeah,” Connor agreed. He kissed Dylan’s neck, and backed off the millimeters necessary for Dylan to focus again. 

 

“To be clear, don’t ever stop,” he said, wrapping one of Connor's arms around his waist as he still worked on his phone.

 

He’d never used the time-lapse app before, and he’d also never used the video editing app Connor used, so all he could really be were fresh eyes. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Dylan admitted and pulled out his own phone to do some googling. 

 

They ended up having to upload the videos into google drive and then download them to Connor's computer, and email them back to his phone. It was dumb. 

 

“That app cost five bucks and it can’t even import into my video editing app?” 

 

“Do you even remember the first computer you ever had in your house?” Dylan asked, watching as Connor slowly cut together the footage. He had a little clip he had filmed on Saturday, introducing the video, Dylan and Cam huddled over the plans behind him, but then he just set the time-lapse sections to some music he had on his phone, and hit the “upload to YouTube” button.

 

“Whoah, whoah, whoah,” Dylan said, before he hit publish. “Babe, this is why your videos have no hits.” 

 

“What do you mean?” Connor asked. 

 

“Because you’re putting up a video that has no title or tags. Call it something like, I don’t know, Tiny House Building Time Lapse, or something, and tag the shit out of it so it’s searchable.” 

 

“You found my video though,” Connor said, looking confused. 

 

“Babe, I found your video because I was purposefully hunting down videos that no one watches.” 

 

“Why would you do that?” he asked. He’d put his phone down though without hitting ‘publish.’

 

“Uh, I guess because it makes me feel less lonely when I’m having a shitty day, or something? I’m not really sure.” It was always hard to admit that he got lonely. No one posted about their loneliness on social media, and when they did, it was framed as an ‘internet cleanse’ or something. Like, _I’m being ignored by everyone, so I’m going to pretend I’m ignoring them first, and brag about that on the internet_ kind of thing. Dylan couldn’t connect to that.

 

It was like there was a shift in the air. It was so easy for Dylan to talk to Connor normally, but this came out so stiff, and he could tell Connor could feel it. 

 

Connor just wrapped his arms back around Dylan’s shoulders. The couch in Dylan’s living room was deep and plush, and it was easy for Dylan to hunker down in Connor's arms and feel small but protected for a little while. 

 

Connor took his time responding. Dylan was used to that, the silences that could stretch out over the phone while Connor collected his thoughts. Connor always felt like he was better at texting than talking, but Dylan would always prefer to hear his voice if possible. 

 

“I’m not going to sit here and judge you for your coping mechanism. You watch some YouTube videos. I’m actively spending my life savings doing something ridiculous for reasons I can’t completely wrap my head around. We’re all just getting through it.” 

 

Dylan laughed a little. He liked how serious Connor was. He was so driven and passionate that it was magnetic. But when he tried to make a joke, it was beyond charming, and Dylan laughed harder than the light moment really warranted.

 

“So you’re going to help me tag this video?”

 

“Yeah, yeah, lemme do my magic.” Dylan was good at searching YouTube. He felt like he had been searching YouTube for very specific things his whole life. He added twenty tags to Connor's video rapid fire, and spruced up the title a little. Tiny House Build: Raising the Walls. 

 

He let Connor hit post. The sun was setting through Dylan’s window. Connor kept yawning. 

 

“You have another training shift tomorrow, right?” Dylan asked.

 

“Yeah, early,” he said regretfully. The effort he had to put forth to regulate his sleep schedule into something that allowed him to get up at seven am and learn about different kinds of fertilizer was absolutely monumental.

 

“I know you should probably get home, but I don’t want you to leave.” He liked the feeling of Connor against him, Connor's body heat seeping through two layers of t-shirt cotton to get to Dylan, his shoulders a broad and solid place to rest his head.

 

“In the spirit of attempting to take things slow, I probably should get home.” But he held Dylan even tighter.

 

Eventually, Connor got out the door. Dylan knew it was the right choice. He knew that it would be harder for Connor to leave in the morning. But he couldn’t deny that waking up with Connor in his bed was something he wanted.

 

Before he went to bed, he pulled up Connor's new video to watch again. He’d watched them all a bazillion times already. He still liked watching them even though Connor was a real person he could call and talk to.

 

“Holy shit,” Dylan said, looking at the view count. It was already past thirty, which was way more than any of his other videos. 

 

 _I made you famous_ he texted to Connor with the little old school cinema camera emoji.

 

Connor sent back a string of exclamation points.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Halfway there! Thanks for stickin' with me! <3


	6. Chapter 6

After Connor got enough coffee in him, he kinda liked the hardware store training. The crowd that the little local store drew was so much different than the Home Depot crowd. Everyone who came in to find something had seemingly endless time on their hands, and liked to talk over every possible solution to each individual problem with Wayne, sometimes twice. Wayne had endless patience, and seemed to encourage it.

 

“That’s why people come here, kid,” Wayne said, after talking to a customer for forty-five minutes about cleaning out his gutters. “They go to the big guys and get ignored. They’re people here. Let me show you the string trimmers.” 

 

At the end of the day, Connor felt like his brain was going to explode. He was certain he wouldn’t be able to sell anyone the right nut, bolt, screw, or nail ever in his life, and his feet killed from being on them all day. He was sure he’d never get that hardware store smell off of him. 

 

Still, when he called Dylan on his drive home, he couldn’t help but sound happy.

 

 

\--

 

Framing and raising the roof seemed like a complicated job to Connor. He and Cam had been talking strategy and settled on the strategy of getting as much help as possible.

 

There were five of them that Saturday morning, ready to assemble the gables and get them on top of the wall frames. Connor and Cam, Dylan, Aaron, and Connor's mom. Connor's mom had helped Connor spend Thursday and Friday night cutting the beams so they’d be ready to secure.

 

It was an odd mix of people for Connor. Of course, his mom knew Aaron. Aaron had practically lived in their house when Arron’s family still lived on Oak Street. Dylan was the person who mixed things up. He hadn’t told his mom straight out that Dylan was his boyfriend, but Connor had kissed him hello at the breakfast table, his mom crunching down some toast across the table, so he assumed she had to know. Aaron had bugged Connor about Dylan the week before, and now was bugging Dylan about Connor.

 

“You know when he was a kid his teeth were even more jacked up than they are now?” he started in, as Dylan held the collar tie that Aaron was screwing secure. Connor watched as his mom asked him questions about the design. His mom didn’t know anything about construction. Connor let her words drift through him as Dylan perked up at the suggestion.

 

“Do you have photos? How cute was he?” Dylan asked, and Connor calmed down a little.

 

“I’ll find you some,” Aaron said, shooting Connor a smile from across the driveway.

 

“I’m just not sure that this is going to be stable,” his mom said, and Connor turned his attention back to her, assuring her that lots of people had built these same plans, and everything turned out okay for them. Even people who knew what they were doing had built from them.

 

Connor caught Aaron and Cam telling Dylan about how when he was a kid he slept with his street hockey stick in his bed with him, and later heard Aaron having what sounded to Connor like a Very Grownup conversation with Dylan about his job and his career aspirations. He was surprised at the things that Dylan was saying actually. His career aspirations seemed more concrete than they had discussed previously. It confused Connor, but he had other things to think about. Like raising the roof. The number of times Cam pumped his flat palms above his head and yelled “raise the roof” that day was astounding to Connor. The fact that Aaron and Dylan both laughed every time he did it made Connor question his taste in human beings.

 

“This went...well,” Connor said, looking at the framed roof almost baffled by how well it had gone up. When Wayne had heard that Connor was currently building a tiny house, he’d given him some tips on making a birdsmouth cut, and how to lay out the ridge board that made things go if not faster exactly, than a little smoother.

 

Dylan hooked his chin over Connor's shoulder as they stood in a little circle just kind of...looking at each other. 

 

“I thought this would take two days,” Cam said, brushing off his work gloves before slipping them off his hands and sticking them in his back pocket.

 

“Day off tomorrow then,” Connor said. They headed back to the house and dispersed, while Connor and Dylan only made it to the kitchen to grab snacks before hunkering down in the basement again.

 

“Your mom is pretty strong,” Dylan said, Twizzler sticking out of his mouth, feet up in Connor's lap. Connor had a La Croix in his hand because he was an old person now. Ten years before it would have been a Mountain Dew, but now real soda was too sweet for him. “I think getting that main beam up there would have crushed my dad. The only things he lifts are like, cheese plates. Charcuterie boards. Selections of varietal olives. Snack plates of all kinds. My mom is only interested in the kinds of physical activity that can be counted by her Fitbit.” 

 

Connor laughed. “Yeah, my mom’s pretty spry, I guess.” They had the TV on in the background but they talked over it for a while before Dylan scooted close enough to Connor to show him funny YouTube videos on his phone. Connor asked to see some of those videos that Dylan liked to hunt for, the ones no one watched, and Dylan hesitated.

 

“I need to find the right one first,” he said, face pinched and serious, like it was important. It wasn’t just a stupid time waster for Dylan. Those videos meant something to him, and Connor was just starting to understand that.

 

In exchange for the videos Dylan offered up, mostly skate videos and animal videos, Connor pulled up a bad cartoon rap song and some cool hockey trick shots videos. He liked watching Dylan’s entire face crack open in laughter at the exact same moments he had thought were particularly hilarious. Sometimes when he showed people videos, they didn’t react the way Connor had wanted them to. They didn’t get out of the video what he got. But Dylan did. Their humor must be pretty well aligned, or something.

 

“Hey,” Connor said during a lull, when Dylan was trying to find a particular video of a steamroller running over a bike or something, “I heard you talking to Aaron this afternoon.” 

 

“Yeah, he seemed nice. A little...I don’t know, preppy or something. But like a good guy. And don’t worry, we didn’t exchange numbers so he’s not just going to randomly start sending me photos of you in your middle school head-gear.”

 

“No, I meant, he was asking you about your job, and you sounded so…”

 

“Fucking stupid? I know.” Dylan rolled his eyes and took another bite off probably his tenth Twizzler.

 

“I was going to say scarily grown-up.” 

 

“Babe,” Dylan said, tipping his head back against the couch so he could look at Connor. They always ended up so tangled that it took some distance to actually be able to see each other speak. “That’s just the crap I say to people who have their shit together. I don’t want some dumb middle management position at my shitty office job. I’d quit tomorrow if I could. But it’s like how when someone you don’t know very well asks you how you’re doing and you just say ‘great!’ because that’s the only answer you can give without making everyone uncomfortable? Well, my Corporate Dreams and Aspirations are my ‘yeah, I’m doing fine today,’ even if it’s bullshit.”

 

“Oh,” Connor said. He didn’t even have a ‘great!’ answer to give to people. He’d never thought about it that way. When people asked him about his life, he just described his current mess. “I guess that makes sense.”

 

Dylan cuddled back into his side on the couch. “It’s not some secret part of me that you don’t know about, I promise. How I actually feel is the secret part of me that only you know.” 

 

It shouldn’t have calmed Connor down to know that his boyfriend worked a shitty job that he hated and dreaded the thought of having a job there for so long it became his career. He felt bad about that fact settling something inside of him. So much of how he felt about Dylan was based on how easily they had always understood each other, and Connor was heartened to know that they still did. Connor didn’t know if he would be as head-over-heels for Dylan if middle management was what he actually wanted out of his life.

 

“You still wanna stay over?” Connor asked.

 

“Do I get to sleep in your bed?” 

 

“I think that can be arranged.” 

 

“Yeah, I’d like that.” They'd already talked about it, made arrangements for Dylan to spend the night. Dylan had brought his toothbrush and his meds. Connor was just double checking. He always liked to be sure that Dylan was happy and comfortable at all times.  

 

They kept watching dumb videos on the internet for almost an hour, expanding into complications of Dylan’s favorite Vines, before Connor pulled them both up from the couch and they started getting ready for bed. They changed into pajamas, and Connor sweetly turned around to give Dylan a little privacy. They took turns brushing their teeth in the small basement bathroom, and when Connor got finished, Dylan was already stretched out on his bed, curled under the covers.

 

Connor had never really had a relationship serious enough to share a bed with someone, but when he climbed in after Dylan, he easily arranged their bodies together, his chest warm against Connor's back.

 

“I’m so fucking tired,” Dylan said, his words hot and damp on the back of Connor's neck. Dylan nosed at Connor's hairline briefly, and Connor hummed in agreement. “All I do all day is sit at a desk, and sometimes go to the gym. I never do anything real anymore. I like doing this real thing with you.”

 

“You don’t feel like you have to or anything?” 

 

Dylan huffed a laugh. “You’d know if I didn’t want to do something. I’m a complainer.”

 

Connor smiled to himself. He’d had a good time that day, even when the sun was hot on their backs and Cam was telling bad jokes, and their mom was being such a mom about things. He liked that Dylan had enjoyed it too.

 

\--

 

Dylan was pretty sure he could get used to waking up with Connor McDavid’s cheek pressed against his chest, their limbs tangled and maybe a little asleep. He was sweet in the morning, dirty blonde hair rumpled, body almost too warm from sleeping.

 

Then reality came into focus and he realized that he woke up because Connor's phone was buzzing on his nightstand. 

 

“Babe, your phone,” he whispered, shaking Connor awake a little. He just nuzzled right into Dylan’s armpit, which Dylan didn’t think could be a totally pleasant experience, but Connor didn’t seem bothered by it. It took him a few seconds to collect his bearings before he answered the phone. He mumbled out a few responses before he turned to Dylan.

 

“You don’t want to go to the farmer’s market with my mom do you?” he asked, looking pleadingly at him, like he wanted Dylan to say no. But Dylan was awake. Like,  _awake_  awake, thanks to his terrible adult life, and he kinda wanted to check it out. He could hear Connor's mom on the phone. _Tell him breakfast is on me!_

 

“I’m in,” Dylan said, loud enough for Connor's mom to hear through the phone. 

 

“I’m sleeping for another twenty minutes,” he told both his mom and Dylan, and hung up the phone.

 

“Polite of her to call.” 

 

“I think she’d probably just be horrified if she had to wake me up with a boy in my bed.” Dylan thought about that as Connor snuggled back into him. Dylan wasn’t the kind of person who could fall back to sleep once he woke up usually, so he spent the twenty minutes thinking about how Connor's bed was a little softer than his, how his comforter still smelled clean unlike Dylan’s own. How his pillowcases all matched. It was hard to tell if that was because of Connor, or because his mom still made him change his sheets. At that moment, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the feeling of Connor limp against him, his breaths long and deep in his sleep.

 

\--

 

“We’re getting strawberries, tomatoes, those purple potatoes Cam likes so much for whatever reason, and whatever else we come across and have to have,” Connor's mom said, as they entered the farmer’s market. Connor felt a little stab of uselessness for taking a day off of the tiny house, but he didn’t have the materials or the game plan for the next step, and Dylan and Cam had both convinced him it wouldn’t be the end of the world. “And maybe some avocados for you, sweetheart. Dylan, do you like avocados?” 

 

Connor's mom had been cool about Dylan up until now, but he could sense that this trip was not just about the farmer’s market. She was going to mom-grill him, and Connor pitied his soul. He grabbed Dylan’s hand and gave it a squeeze.

 

“Yes I do, Mrs. McDavid,” Dylan said, so politely it hurt.

 

“Oh honey, call me Kelly,” she said, beelining to the crepe stand. 

 

The market was crowded and the day was warm, but there was a breeze in the air, and clouds just wispy enough to be decorative and not threatening in the sky.

 

They sat briefly to eat their crepes, and Connor's mom talked to them both about her week, and her garden, and Cam. Connor thought it must be completely boring to have to sit through the minutiae of someone else’s life, but Dylan listened and asked questions about what Kelly was planting, and where Cam was living. By the end of the meal, Kelly was smiling at Dylan in her approving mom way, and while she spent their time walking around the market alternating between asking questions and giving Connor produce to put in the canvas bags they brought, she was sensitive to the topics that Dylan shied away from. She asked more questions about his family than his job. She bought him a danish at the bread stand when she saw him drooling over it, and Dylan gave Connor a bite of it. Dylan bought some local honey and some weird cheese for his dad.

 

Connor had never exactly kept his dating life a secret, but it had always felt so separate from his family life. But he watched Dylan help his mom learn how to use a power drill the day before, and now, watching her ask Dylan for opinions on which mangoes to buy, well, Dylan didn’t seem so separate.

 

\--

 

It was a weeknight, so Connor was at Dylan’s apartment. Dylan felt like their relationship was only snowballing, and he thought it would only keep going on this trajectory. Dylan’s roommate had a couple friends over for the show they always watched on Wednesday nights — something about a bunch of dumb boys and a tech start-up, or something — so Dylan and Connor were in Dylan’s room, curled up against the headboard together with Netflix on Dylan’s laptop.

 

“I can’t believe how much money I’m not making,” Connor said, looking at his bank account. He’d gotten paid for the first time that day.

 

Dylan kissed his temple and tried not to notice that Connor had sixty bucks in his checking. Dylan would shit himself if he only had that much. “You’re just getting started at Wayne’s though,” he said, trying to be consoling, even if he was a little terrified. He knew Connor had some savings, but still.

 

“To be completely honest, I haven’t exactly figured out how I’m going to survive while I do this,” he said, switching over to a spreadsheet of his budget. It was a mess, with clumps of numbers all over the place, poorly labeled and sad looking. “It seemed really easy at the beginning, and we don’t even have like, walls yet and I’m already wondering if I’m going to get partway through this and have to quit.” 

 

“You’re not going to have to quit,” Dylan said. “If you need to pause, you can pause. But you’ll finish.”

 

Connor slumped into him. “Making minimum wage is more painful than the wounds to my pride I think.” 

 

“It’s not forever.” 

 

“I need to cut back on something,” Connor said. They were watching a show about home renovation on Netflix, so the soft sounds of hammers and saws filled the air as Connor scrolled through his budget. “Jesus gas is so expensive.” 

 

“Your truck is huge,” Dylan said because he didn’t really know what else to say. “Though...you probably spend a ton just coming to see me.” 

 

“I’m not cutting you out of my budget,” Connor said, sour.

 

“I’m just saying, you coming out here is mutually beneficial to both of us. I could chip in for your gas. Or I could come hang at your place more often.” 

 

“I want to spend as little time in my mom’s house as possible,” Connor said, fingernail tapping the shell of his phone. And then, short and clipped: “And I don’t want your money.” 

 

“It wouldn’t be like I was paying you to come out here or anything,” Dylan said, not really thinking about the words he was using.

 

“Dylan, stop talking,” Connor said.

 

“I’m sorry, I just-” 

 

“Please don’t make me feel like I have a sugar daddy.” 

 

“Grossest phrase in all of human history,” Dylan said and watched the smallest corner of Connor's lips turn up. “I take my offer back then. I never offered. We’ll just cook more here instead of getting so much takeout, alright?”

 

Connor paused, looking through his budget again. “That might help,” he finally said reluctantly. “I just need to make enough to live off of, so I don’t have to dig into my house savings.” 

 

“Plenty of free shit to do in Toronto in the summer,” Dylan said.

 

“Like lay in bed and watch your boyfriend’s Netflix account,” Connor said. He put his phone next to Dylan’s on his side table, and actually started paying attention to the computer balanced on Dylan’s knees.

 

“We can both save money this summer. Live cheap.” 

 

“That means shitty beer or no beer,” Connor said mournfully.

 

“I’ll just get Ryan to buy us beer like we’re babies,” Dylan said. He played with the fluffy hair on the back of Connor's neck. 

 

“I can deal with that,” he said. “Do you think I need more drill bits?”

 

“Your bank account thinks you’re doing just fine with the ones you have.”

 

“Point.”

 

\--

 

Connor woke to Dylan's alarm. That's how he already knew he was happy. If he was with Dylan, he was happy. There weren't a lot of qualifiers going on.

 

Dylan was warm and pressed against him, dead to the world. Usually, Connor was the one who struggled to life in the morning, never rested enough from the night's sleep. This morning however, Dylan made no move to hit the snooze button. The alarm blared out from its spot on the side table, glowing blue in the darkness of the room. Dylan let out a little displeased moan and tucked himself into Connor. Connor reached over him to hit the snooze button. Dylan allowed himself two snoozes. Connor could have snoozed for hours, easily falling back asleep between each.

 

"You can just turn it off," Dylan said, his voice heavy and distant. "I'm not going to work today."

 

"You sick?" Connor asked, smoothing Dylan's shaggy bangs off his forehead.

 

"I'm taking a mental health today on account of my mental health." Connor watched Dylan grope for his phone, quickly choose a contact, and leave a voicemail that made it sound like he was dying. His movements were slow, and not just in a six-in-the-morning kind of way. 

 

"You want me to stay with you?" Connor asked. He didn't really...get it. He sounded sick. He sounded like he needed someone to take care of him.

 

"Don't you have a shift?" Dylan asked. He knew Connor's shift schedule as well as Connor did. He'd stay up late with Connor on days when he didn't work, but when he had a shift he made Connor go to bed early.

 

"I'll call Greg and see if he can swap with me," Connor said, reaching for his own phone. He had his own charger and his own side table at Dylan’s, but he was smushed so far into Dylan's side of the bed he had to practically crawl to get it. His co-worker Greg was easy to convince, willing to take Connor's morning shift to work eight hours that day, in exchange for Connor working both their shifts the next day. Connor told him it was a family emergency. It felt like the truth.

 

Connor worried as they slipped back to sleep, the alarm fully off, the responsibilities for the day allocated, because he didn't know what Dylan meant by a mental health day.

 

\--

 

 

When Connor woke again an hour later he had to pee, then pit-stopped in the kitchen to find something to eat. They had leftover quesadillas from the night before, and Connor ate a triangle cold, standing over the sink, letting his mind go blank as his body only worked on chewing and standing and being awake so early. He didn't know if he should make coffee. He didn't know if Dylan would want to get up.

 

"Hey dude, kinda late for you to still be here," Dylan's roommate Drew said, bursting the bubble on Connor's early morning disassociation. "Dyl already gone?" 

 

"He's here. He's...taking a mental health day?" Connor tested out the words in his mouth.

 

"Oh," Drew said, obviously recognizing what those words meant. "Sorry, dude. Tell him I hope he feels better."

 

"I don't really understand." 

 

"He's just having a low day. You know. Depression.” Drew said it so plainly, but it still sounded like a string of English words that didn't add up to a sentence. Dylan hadn't told him he was depressed. Was he _depressed_ depressed? When Connor thought of Dylan, it was his easy smile, his silliness.

 

Connor brought a glass of water back into Dylan's room. It finally looked like daytime in there, sunlight bright enough through the curtains to lend some illumination. Dylan was awake, still curled under the covers, eyes deep and sad.

 

"I'm worried about you," Connor said, slipping back into Dylan's bed because not being next to him wasn't an option.

 

"Just need to wallow in my own self-pity today," Dylan said. Connor could hear him straining for a joke, but his voice couldn't reach it. It remained elusive.

 

"Did something happen?" Connor got sad when something sad happened. His sadness followed logic, made sense. He wasn't getting that about Dylan's sadness.

 

"Woke up sad," Dylan said. He pressed his forehead to Connor's chest.

 

"What do you need me to do?" Connor asked.

 

"Nothing. Just. Can we go back to sleep?" Dylan pulled the covers over his shoulders, his body struggling to get comfortable. Connor had already slept through the night and slept in. He didn't think his body was letting him sleep anymore. He grabbed his phone again so he could scroll through the internet while Dylan slept against him.

 

"Yeah, let's go back to sleep," he said. Dylan's head was resting on his bicep, their legs tangled. Connor scrolled Facebook with a thumb as he stroked through Dylan's hair with his other hand.

 

\--

 

Finally, Dylan dragged himself out of bed to use the bathroom. It looked exactly like dragging. Like his body was resisting the movements his brain was giving them. Or his body was betraying the signals his brain was sending to stay put.

 

It was almost eleven, and Connor was starving. He headed into the kitchen to raid Dylan's fridge. The shelves in the fridge were separated between Dylan and Drew, and Connor was familiar with what was available to him and what was off-limits.

 

There wasn't much, but there were eggs, and by the time Dylan wandered into the kitchen, Connor was scrambling them in a pan, bread down in the toaster. Dylan shuffled up behind him and wrapped his arms around Connor's waist.

 

"Are you making me food?" He mumbled into the back of Connor's neck. Dylan wasn't a good cook to begin with. If he was having...a low day...or something, Connor couldn't imagine cooking being a thing he'd want to do.

 

"Some scrambled eggs and toast," Connor said. "Figured you'd need some protein."

 

Dylan kissed the back of his neck. "I'm going to go lay on the couch if that's okay."

 

"Yeah, baby. You take care of yourself." Connor bit his lip and watched Dylan walk into the living room, curling up on the couch and pulling the blanket that was hanging over the back of it over him. Connor was at the point of his day where he wanted to like, go run around or something.

 

He brought their food into the living room and Dylan sat up to eat it, slumped against Connor.

 

Connor flipped on the TV and chose a movie channel, halfway through The Hangover, a movie they'd watched together before, so the pressure to follow the plot was alleviated. Dylan slid down to lay his head in Connor's lap.

 

Connor was pretty sure he fell back to sleep.

 

The afternoon wore on, and Dylan stayed lazy and sad.

 

"Can I take you out to dinner?" Connor asked. His mind was on his money; he and Dylan did not go out to eat. Normally paying twelve dollars for a sandwich would make him have heart palpitations. But he just wanted to see a smile on Dylan's face, and any amount of money to get there seemed reasonable.

 

"I don't really want to put real clothes on." It was a persuasive argument. Connor had remembered wishing they could have lazy pajama days together. It had sounded nice in his head, watching movies and not having to put real pants on. This situation colored it in a different light. Dylan was usually eager to put actual pants on in the morning. Maybe it helped stave off the way he was feeling now, but Connor could only guess.

 

"We could order food," Connor suggested. Dylan flipped over onto his other side and pressed his face into Connor's belly.

 

"That would be fine," he said. It took a couple suggestions before they settled on the Chinese food place Connor knew was Dylan's favorite.

 

He ordered way too much food and convinced Dylan, after much coaxing, that they should take a shower, maybe put new pajamas on.

 

It wasn't a sexy shower. It was just Connor washing Dylan's hair, Dylan standing, expression vacant, letting the water pour down onto his face. Dylan's sad eyes were big and brown as he thanked Connor for drying him off with a fluffy towel, and digging through his dresser for clean pajamas.

 

They were scrubbed and new by the time the food arrived. Connor signed the credit card slip and tried not to think of the money coming out of his account. It would have to come out of his house budget. It wasn't catastrophic. He saw Dylan smile a little as he piled a bowl full of white rice and beef and broccoli and an egg roll.

 

"Thanks baby," he said, giving Connor a kiss on the cheek while he was scooping his own food out of the takeout containers. "I'm feeling a little better. The shower helped." His messy hair was still damp, his body still looking heavy on his frame, but he didn't look as vacant as that morning.

 

"Anything else I can do?" Connor asked. He wanted to be perfect for Dylan, the way Dylan was perfect for him.

 

"Watch The Wire with me?"

 

They hadn't made it further than the couch that day, but Connor thought maybe that wasn't so bad. He couldn't imagine Dylan having to go to work that day.

 

They ate quietly, letting the TV fill the space in the air.

 

"This...happens sometimes," Dylan said finally, cradling his empty bowl in his hands. "My bad days. Maybe I should have told you about it, but I've been so happy lately that I kind of forgot."

 

“Drew said you have depression," Connor said, unsure of how to talk about it.

 

"Yeah, um. It's not so bad usually. Not since I started taking the right drugs a few years ago. It wasn't so great when I was a teenager, but it's mostly figured out, you know? I just have a low like, baseline happiness or something. My brain chemistry is just kinda unbalanced. Sometimes I have days like this."

 

"Is there anything else I can do to help?" Connor was to the point where he wanted to buy a puppy just so he could put the soft fluffy baby-ness into Dylan's lap to comfort him.

 

"Everything you did today was more than enough. Usually, I do days like this alone. Not too many people have the right patience level for it. Thanks for staying with me today."

 

“Wouldn’t have left if you paid me,” Connor said, like that made his decision to stay obvious. Maybe it did. “And believe me, I could use the money.”

 

Dylan laughed. "Sometimes I can't believe I found you on the internet, and you actually like me," Dylan said, his smile finally making his face look familiar.

 

\--

 

Megan went into labor late Friday night. She’d pushed her first baby out with relative ease and swiftness, especially for a firstborn. The second one wasn’t coming along so well. 

 

Dylan was supposed to wake up early to go to Connor's and work on the house, but there he was, three in the morning, hauling supplies into the hospital.

 

“Where are Mom and Dad?” Dylan asked, after wandering the halls of the hospital trying to find Megan’s room. Ryan was sitting on a chair next to Megan who looked tired and angry and bored in her hospital gown.

 

“Marching around the whole hospital I think. Dad’s trying to ‘find something edible’ in one of the vending machines. I tried to tell him baked brie was unlikely. Mom’s trying to get to ten thousand steps for the day before the sun comes up I think.” 

 

“I can’t believe she’s using this as an opportunity to cheat,” Megan said. She still had her Fitbit on her wrist. “I actually could have beaten her this week if not for this stupid birth.” 

 

“The miracle of our child,” Ryan said, dryly.

 

“Push a watermelon out your asshole and then come talk to me.”

 

Dylan didn’t even pretend not to laugh at that. He knew that Megan would be back to being normal and sweet soon, but for now, he soaked up her harsh edges.

 

Dylan’s “supplies” were basically a variety of gas station junk food and energy drinks. Who designed giving birth in the middle of the night? Shouldn’t the baby be asleep?

 

“You guys scared?” Dylan asked, halfway through a Snickers and a bottle of soda. 

 

“Only scared this thing will never come out of me,” Megan said.

 

“The first one was terrifying. But we survived. And she’s awesome,” Ryan said, glowing like Megan had been earlier in her pregnancy. “I’m just excited for this one now.” 

 

“You’re never going to sleep again," Dylan pointed out.

 

“Overrated.”

 

“Or have any quiet time to yourself.” 

 

“Who needs it?”

 

“Or money.” 

 

Ryan just shrugged. “It’s worth it. When you hold your own baby in your arms, you’ll get it.”

 

“Closest thing I’m holding to my own baby is your baby,” Dylan said.

 

“Yeah, and soon I hope,” Megan said.

 

Ryan squeezed her hand. “If I could push too, I would.” 

 

“I will literally kill you.” 

 

\--

 

Connor woke up to a long string of texts from Dylan saying that he wouldn’t be over until the afternoon because he’d stayed up all night for the birth of Elizabeth Rose Strome, but it was worth it because she’s perfect. Or whatever people say about babies. He honestly just didn’t have a lot of experience with them.

 

He spent more time in bed than he usually would Saturday morning. His brother was late, Dylan wasn’t coming, and he had actual, real comments on his videos.

 

The video that Dylan had titled and tagged for him was up over three hundred views, and the relative popularity of it had boosted the view counts of his other videos too. Most of the comments were pretty nice. People complimenting him on his framing or on the project in general. There was one terribly mean comment that Connor just deleted without thinking about it too much. He shuddered to think about the comments people would be leaving if he was a girl.

 

He replied to the handful that had shown up scattered across his videos, all just about building, or tiny houses in general.

 

He hadn’t set out to get his videos a lot of views. He had just wanted to keep a little video journal of the work he was doing. But getting views and comments was...validating. It felt different from the interactions he’d had with Dylan because of his videos. Dylan had had a crush on him from like the first moment, if Connor was to believe him. These people just liked his tiny house or liked his videos, or something. It felt like having an audience instead of having...he didn’t know...an admirer?

 

He sent Dylan a screenshot of his view count with a good morning message for him to wake up to and told him to just come over whenever he wanted to.

 

As he got dressed after his shower, he threw a couple more things away. A jar with old pens in it, a stuffed animal that he wasn’t too emotionally attached to. He was trying to gradually but constantly shed his things. 

 

He felt good with every new item he tossed. Lighter. More streamlined. Like he was molting.

 

\--

 

By the time Dylan got to Connor's, he and Cam had both quit for the day. Mostly because Connor had hit his thumb very, very hard with a hammer, and required stitches. He was so pouty when Dylan arrived that he barely felt the lift in his spirits that he usually did from Dylan’s presence. Dylan kissed the bandage and pulled Connor in for a hug, and that made him feel a little better. Not great though. 

 

He slumped into Dylan’s chest. “I’m bad at this and stupid,” Connor whined, feeling the full force of his own embarrassment and shame. This was the thing that he’d kind of put his life on hold for. The thing that had dictated where he’d gotten his current job. 

 

“You’re neither of those things,” Dylan said, rubbing his back. They were still in the front entryway of Connor's house, and he knew people could probably hear him. His mom was floating around somewhere in the house.

 

“Can we make a pizza and watch YouTube?” Connor asked, and Dylan nodded and kissed his forehead. They sat in the kitchen and drank Cokes while the frozen pizza baked, and Connor told Dylan about how they couldn’t figure out the plans for the ventilation system. 

 

“I think I’m going to have to do some research or email the person who made the designs or something, because I’m sure they’re perfectly clear if you know how to read them, right? I just can’t fucking figure out what I’m supposed to do. And then Cam had to drive my bleeding ass to the fucking ER to get sewn up and I’m feeling...I know I can’t quit, I just want to, you know?” 

 

Dylan patted his lap, and Connor kicked his feet up into it. Dylan dug his tumbs into Connor's arches before he spoke again. 

 

“Just take a day off from worrying about it. Monday, bring your plans to Wayne and ask him for help.” 

 

“He’s going to think I’m some dumb asshole,” Connor complained. “I already can’t answer more than half the questions I get asked.” 

 

“You just started. You’re doing great. Wayne would love a chance to spend an hour talking to someone about their project.” 

 

Connor just groaned and sank lower into his chair. “Why are you so patient with me?” 

 

“Because you’re so cute,” Dylan said, and finally Connor smiled.

 

“I thought it would be hard but I didn’t think it would be send-me-to-the-hospital hard.” 

 

“That’s how you have to learn some things. Building is super hard, and coming from the same level I’m at, you’re already way better than I am.” 

 

“I’m not sure that’s true.” 

 

“I’m just a pair of lifting arms,” Dylan said. “You’re the director.” 

 

“And Cam.” 

 

“No one ever said you had to do any of this alone,” Dylan said.

 

“God, I love you,” Connor spat out without thinking about it. He’d been thinking he should wait to say those words to Dylan, even though he didn’t doubt his feelings. He just didn’t know if they were...there yet. He didn’t know how to tell.

 

“For real?” Dylan asked back. Dylan’s everyday smile was small and coy, only half the wattage possible. Now, his face stretched into a smile as big and goofy as Connor's own. 

 

“Yeah, yeah. For real,” Connor said. He wasn’t sure if he should be defensive or if he should take it back. But he couldn’t take it back. Not when it was true.

 

Dylan reached for his hand, and Connor gave it over, letting Dylan pull him to sit on his lap. “I love you, too,” he said, tilting his head up to kiss Connor. It was sparks and energy and intensity, and if his miserable day had led to the way he felt in that moment, he’d hammer each one of his fingers and toes to the point of stitches to feel this way again. Dylan’s hands were gentle on his neck and his jaw, combing up through his hair. Connor pulled back to breathe. It was flooding his system, overworking the part of his brain that processed happiness.

 

“I love you,” he said again, because he was already craving hearing it back, like an addict needing a hit.

 

“I love you,” Dylan returned, his smile softer now, fond and sweet.

 

“Mmmm feel free to say that as many times as you want,” Connor said, just as the timer for the pizza went off. Connor had forgotten they were making a pizza. He’d forgotten they were in his mom’s kitchen, blatantly making out and exchanging declarations of love. He hoped his mom was still out in the garage re-staining the Adirondack chairs. Connor's project had apparently ‘inspired her,’ but really he knew that when he got done with building, he’d be cleaning up the garage, and the staining mess. He was fine with that.

 

They brought the pizza downstairs and ate and watched videos online. Dylan was sweeter to him than he really needed to be, but Connor was still hurting — his thumb and his ego — and he just let Dylan take care of him. 

 

And every once in a while, Dylan would whisper an ‘I love you,’ in his ear, and Connor would return it.


	7. Chapter 7

Canada Day was a huge production in Dylan’s parent’s neighborhood. There was always a block party, with a barbecue and a street hockey tournament. Dylan’s mom told him in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t bring Connor with him, they were disowning him.  

 

They showed up in Dylan’s neighborhood in Mississauga early enough to help his mom set up the tables for the food, and have Connor meet the family before the chaos happened.

 

The relationship Dylan had with the house he grew up in hadn’t changed much since he moved out. It still felt like “his house.” It’s not like he knocked when they got there, pushing through the door to the garage like Dylan had done every day after school, the code to the garage encoded so deep in his brain he could barely tell you what the numbers actually were. His fingers just knew what buttons to hit.

 

His house smelled right, like whatever his dad was cooking, and the candles his mom burned everywhere.

 

His brother’s family was already there, set up in the living room with enough of their baby stuff it looked like they would have needed a moving van to get it all here.

 

“This is Connor,” he said, introducing each of them to him. Connor shook hands and hugged his mom, and got a toddler shoved into his arms.

 

“Be thankful you don’t have long hair or earrings,” Megan said from the couch where the tiniest Strome was asleep in her arms. “Pulling on shit is her favorite thing now.”

 

“You don’t need to swear in front of-” Ryan said, pointing to Sophie.

 

“She’s gonna learn it somewhere,” Megan shrugged.

 

Dylan’s dad had made an appetizer platter that was on the coffee table in the middle of the room, and Dylan and Connor sat down on the floor close to it, the spots on the couch taken up already. Dylan made a little salami and cheese cracker sandwich and gave it to Connor. Connor just opened his mouth to take it.

 

“So you’re gross already,” Ryan said. “That’s good news.”

 

“Shuttup,” Dylan said, resting his head on Connor's shoulder.

 

“Dylan hasn’t shut up about you and your tiny house in two months,” Megan said, handing the baby off to Dylan’s mom who had been making her moves to get her hands back on it. “How’s it going? The house?”

 

“Um, it’s harder than I thought it would be, and I thought it was going to be really hard,” Connor said. “I smashed my thumb really bad about three weeks ago, but that’s almost all healed. We got the walls up and the roof on last weekend. Siding is next, I guess.”

 

“How are you doing with it,” Ryan asked Dylan, eyebrows raised. Ryan knew all about Dylan’s claustrophobia. When they were kids Ryan used to wrestle Dylan into their toy chest and sit on the lid of it.

 

“I haven’t been in it with the walls up yet. I had to work that day.” Dylan said.

 

“It’ll be okay. It feels pretty big in there,” Connor said, taking Dylan’s hand. He made Dylan a little cracker sandwich.

 

“It’s like falling in love with a coffin maker,” Ryan said. “I never thought it would happen for you like this.”

 

“It’s a very large coffin, then,” Connor said. “Thoroughly insulated and vented, full plumbing, usable kitchen, technically two sleeping lofts, though I think the front one will be storage for camping gear.”

 

“Please stop using the word ‘coffin’ in conjunction with Connor's house,” Dylan pleaded.

 

“Speaking of small houses,” Dylan’s mom said, her eyes still on the baby in her arms. There was a little bow headband on the baby’s head, to inform the world that it was a girl. Dylan didn’t get it. It was just a baby. “Your father and I have an announcement to make.”

 

His mom looked over to his dad, who was reading the wrapper on a wedge of hard cheese that had probably cost him thirty bucks. Dylan thought about the block of grocery store brand cheddar he and Connor had eaten last night because there was nothing left in Dylan’s fridge. He would have been surprised if it cost more than two fifty. His dad finally looked up from his cheese wrapper. “Hmm?”

 

“I’m telling the kids about our big news.”

 

“How’d they take it?” His dad asked, and his mom rolled her eyes.

 

“Kids, we’ve decided that since we’re empty nesters now, there’s really no reason for us to have all of this extra space to heat and clean.”

 

“No,” Dylan said immediately. He knew what the start of that speech meant.

 

“We’ve been working with a realtor, and the house will be on the market by the end of the month.”

 

“No,” Dylan said again. “You’re not actually selling this house.”

 

“Sweetie, it just isn’t practical for us. We’ve been looking at condos closer to Ryan and Megan.”

 

“Really?” Megan asked, her eyes lighting up.

 

“Traitor,” Dylan said automatically, even though he knew how nice it would be for Megan and Ryan to have more grandparent support when they needed it.

 

“We’ll be retiring in a few years, and we want less of a responsibility. Taking care of a whole house is a lot of work, and it was worth it when you three were here, but now your father and I really only need, well, probably less space than this main floor.”

 

“But the neighborhood. My room.”

 

“You already have a room. It’s in an apartment building outside of Toronto.”

 

“But...what are you going to do with all of my stuff?”

 

“You’re going to have to go through it before it goes on the market. We want to get rid of everything that isn’t essential, so we can have nice clean showings, and not have to go through it when we’re under pressure to move.”

 

“You can’t just store it?”

 

“The point of downsizing, Dylan, is to have fewer things.”

 

“I don’t want to downsize,” Dylan said. “Ryan, c’mon, help me out.” Ryan hadn’t said a thing. He was bouncing his oldest girl on his knees.

 

“Sorry, Dyl. I think it’s a good idea. I was kind of wondering when they were going to do it, honestly.”

 

Connor wrapped an arm around his shoulders. “You’ll be surprised at how much of your stuff you don’t actually want to hold onto once you start looking through it.” Dylan had watched Connor's room in his folk’s house start to look sparser and sparser. Not even Connor was on his side.

 

“I was thinking that you kids could come over and work on your rooms throughout the month, and by August, it’ll be all cleaned out!”

 

“This is insane,” Dylan said. He looked around his house. Once his parents moved, he’d have to start knocking on their door before he entered. He wouldn’t have somewhere to sleep if he needed it. He’d always had this comfort of having “moving back in with his parents” hanging out on the back burner if he needed it. If his job got so bad he had to quit and needed to take some time to think of his next step. This house was his safety net. And now his parents were pulling it away.

 

“It’s the best choice, Dyl,” his dad said, slicing off a chunk of the brick of cheese he’d been inspecting, and handing it over to Dylan like a comfort. Dylan was bitter, but he took the cheese. He wasn’t turning down any food at his parent’s house. He and Connor had been living very poor lately. Sometimes he took himself out to lunch and didn’t tell Connor about it so he wouldn’t feel bad about it. He knew the solidarity was important to Connor.

 

“Well, we should start setting up tables,” his mom told them. “People will start coming in about forty minutes.” His mom gave the baby reluctantly back to Megan, who stayed put while Dylan and Connor headed out to the garage. Connor rubbed his back between his shoulder blades. Dylan wasn’t sure if he was sad or pissed or both. Shouldn’t they have been consulted about this? This was _their_ house.

 

“I know you’re disappointed, sweetie,” his mom said as they dragged a folding table out onto their driveway, where someone had already set up two charcoal grills next to each other. Dylan’s house was in a cul-de-sac, so the party naturally gathered in the circle of asphalt, each house specializing in something different. The Stromes had food, the Nelsons had face painting and a couple little-kid games, there was a house that had a basketball hoop shooting competition.

 

“Just sucks,” Dylan said. Usually, Canada Day was one of his favorite days of the summer. He grew up with the families on this block. When his parents left, their membership with this group of people would end. This would be their last Canada Day block party.

 

When they got the tables set up, Dylan and Connor dug the hockey nets out of the garage and brought them into the street. There was a bucket of red balls, and he and Connor walked around to each family’s driveway to collect their nets and sticks, setting up several competition areas. There would be tag-in hockey and a three-on-three competition. There was a trophy for the winning team.

 

When they were down the block and out of sight of Dylan’s mom, Connor pulled him into a big hug. “I’ll help you go through your stuff,” he said, petting through Dylan’s curls.

 

“Is it dumb to be upset about this?” Dylan asked. Everyone else took it in stride. No one else was upset.

 

“Naw. That’s your home. It gets to be special to you.”

 

“Is it crazy to be jealous of the fact that you live at home still?”

 

“You’re only saying that because your folks are moving. You were not jealous of me until a half hour ago,” Connor said, and Dylan knew it was true. He liked having his own space. He didn’t actually think that living with his parents would be beneficial to anyone. He just wanted the option of it.

 

“I guess,” Dylan said. Connor brushed the hair off Dylan’s forehead to leave a kiss there.

 

Then they headed back.

 

\--

 

 

It took hours for Dylan to start to feel better and enjoy the day. He watched Connor eat a hamburger with far too much ketchup, and absolutely killed all the little kids at street hockey when he and Connor tagged into the casual game that was going on. Usually Dylan played in the tournament, but he had Connor to entertain and introduce to everyone. 

 

As the day folded into nighttime, the people who didn’t have little kids to put to bed ended up in one of his neighbor’s backyards, a fire bright in the fire pit and watery light beer plentiful in coolers.

 

Dylan leaned back against a retaining wall by the fire, and Connor settled between his legs, against his chest. Dylan had ended up with a bag of marshmallows that they were eating without roasting them, too tired from the day to put in the work of making them perfect and golden brown.

 

Dylan was trying to soak it in. Even if they came back next summer for the block party, which folks who had moved away in years past had done, they would be guests. It wouldn’t be theirs anymore. And a new family would be in their house. Dylan didn’t think that he wanted to see that.

 

Beer and marshmallows wasn’t the best combo, but he kept pulling them out of the bag, eating one, then feeding one to Connor, until the fire started dying down, and he had to gently wake Connor up.

 

He drove them straight to Connor's house, so they could wake up in the morning and get straight to work on the house. It was hard juggling their lives now. Dylan knew it would be easier to live together, but he knew it was way too soon — and he didn’t know how that would work anyway. Connor didn’t want rent. Dylan didn’t want to sleep in Connor's coffin.

 

Their lives were just a lot of driving and wearing each other’s clean clothes.

 

There were stray fireworks left that burst above them on the drive back to Newmarket. Connor was asleep in his passenger seat. At least he had this. Sometimes he thought Connor eclipsed too much of the bad shit in his life. Like he held Connor responsible for his happiness. He knew that wasn’t fair to Connor, to rely on him so much. Cam had started joking that they were co-dependent, and Dylan had liked that when Cam had started it. He liked being half of something. Half of Connor-and-Dylan. He didn’t get why it was a bad thing.

 

They hadn’t gone to the tiny house the night before. They’d gone straight from the car down to Connor's room. Connor was only awake enough to stumble down the stairs and pull Dylan into bed with him.

 

\--

 

Connor knew that Dylan was grumpy as soon as they woke up, the residual feelings about his parents selling his house still present. Connor knew his feelings were house-related because Dylan announced it before Connor was fully awake.

 

“Wouldn’t your mom talk to you and Cam about it though, before she put this house on the market?” Dylan asked him. His voice was lucid and clear, like he’d been awake and thinking about it for a while, even though they were the first words out of his mouth that morning.

 

“I dunno,” Connor said, yawning and stretching, cuddling closer to Dylan. Connor wasn’t good at mornings. He didn’t want to have like, _a conversation_ this early. He liked maybe talking about breakfast. He liked sleepy kisses.

 

“I’m sure she would. Your mom is a good person.”

 

“Your folks are good people too, Dyl,” Connor said, pushing up onto his elbows to look at Dylan, his eyes fixed on the ceiling like he was going to use his laser eye powers to cut a hole in it.

 

“I’m not so sure about that.”

 

“Let’s get some food in you before you burn something down with your emotions,” Connor said, recognizing that Dylan was not in a sweet sleepy cuddly mood. Which was a shame. “Get out of bed, lazy,” Connor said, making Dylan roll his eyes at him.

 

“You’d talk to Connor and Cam though before right?” Dylan asked as Connor's mom stood over the stove flipping bacon for them. She was already making breakfast for herself, and she insisted that it wasn’t any more work to toss in some more bacon and a few more eggs. Connor knew that if he could swing it, they should farmer’s market with her the next morning. Dylan’s dad apparently was already through the jar of honey Dylan had gotten him last time, and wanted another. He couldn’t really wrap his head around Dylan’s dad’s diet.

 

“Hm, that’s a good question,” she said, pulling back from the stove to consider it. “I have about eight years left on the mortgage before all I have to worry about is taxes, operating costs, and maintenance. I’ll probably ride it out, honestly. I hate moving.”

 

“Okay, so then Connor is never moving out.”

 

“Connor is building his own house,” Connor said, raising an eyebrow at Dylan as Dylan added even more sugar to the cup of coffee in front of him. He was raised on Iced Capps, and could not stomach black coffee to save his life. Connor thought it was cute, because Connor was in over his head.

 

“I think it would be a family conversation,” Kelly said, poking at the eggs in the pan. “But in the end, once you boys move out for good, you’ve created your own homes. I won’t have two loud teenage boys running around screaming and hitting each other with hockey sticks. It would be nice to have less. Maybe travel more.” Her voice got dreamy at the end, and Dylan tried to put a stop to it.

 

“Oh, no. I did not put an idea in your head. You don’t need to move, Mrs. McDavid.”

 

“Kelly,” she corrected for the thousandth time.

 

“You have everything you need right here. This is the house you raised your babies in. This is the house that you built every important memory in your whole life in. There’s too much important crap in these walls to just hand them over to strangers.”

 

He said ‘strangers’ like he’d say ‘leppers.’

 

“Not sure I’ve ever seen you so impassioned for a cause,” Connor said, standing to help him mom with plates and silverware.

 

“Is there nothing sacred left?”

 

“Baby, it’s not even seven thirty yet. Please reel it in.”

 

Dylan pouted as a plate was put in front of him.

 

“You want toast, honey?” Kelly asked him, gentle like he might snap. He might have.

 

"Yeah. Wheat,” Dylan said, slumping in his chair. And because he was still a good Canadian boy: “Thank you, Kelly.”

 

\--

 

Connor liked getting out to his house when it was still early enough for there to be a chill in the air and dew on the grass. Mornings were hard, but seeing the progress he and Cam had made last week was motivating like crazy. Apparently the first leg, the getting the walls and the roof up part, went quick. Then it started to drag. Connor wanted to hold on to his momentum for as long as possible.

 

“Oh my god it’s so small,” Dylan said, approaching it like it was a lion escaped from the zoo.

 

“It feels huge inside though.”

 

“That’s what she said,” Dylan said. His voice was shaky, even through the dumb joke.

 

“C’mon, sweetheart,” Connor said, eager to show his boy the progress. He took Dylan’s hand and helped him up onto the trailer. There was no door yet, just plywood and house wrap. The interior was just an empty shell. “The kitchen and bathroom will be back there,” Connor said, pointing to the back corners. “Up here will be the sitting area, and that will be a desk, and there will be the ladder up to the loft.”

 

“Connor, it’s so tiny in here,” Dylan said, backing out toward the entrance.

 

“It’s not that little. We don’t have to duck or anything. It’s not a coffin,” Connor said, trying to get a laugh out of Dylan.

 

“Feels like pretty much that though.”

 

Connor wrapped an arm around his shoulders and Dylan turned to him, tucking his face into Connor's neck. He could feel Dylan breathing him in, his breaths intentionally deep.

 

“Okay, let’s get out of here okay? We’re working on the windows today anyway. You can be the person on the outside.” He tried a smile. He didn’t get one back from Dylan.

 

Dylan was out of there like a rocket, feet taking him away from Connor's house and toward the tall grass and the edge of the property line. Connor followed after him, giving him a little space to catch his breath.

 

“Baby,” he said, reaching for his hand. Dylan took it and sighed.

 

“I was hoping it would go better than that. I’d been trying to mentally picture how it was going to feel so I could get past it. It will just take...a little time, I think.” Connor watched him take another deep breath and look up at the sky, vast in its perfect blueness. Not a cloud visible.

 

“Okay,” Dylan said finally. “Can I use the saw today?” He asked, smile tight but present.

 

“You’ll have to fight Cam for it when he finally shows up, but yeah. You can be on saw duty.”

 

They sat in the damp grass together, watching a video on how best to hang the windows. Dylan sat in the vee of Connor's legs, and the hand Connor had slung over Dylan’s chest could feel how fast his heart was still beating. Dylan had mentioned his claustrophobia to him. Ryan had made a comment about it. He just didn’t think that his house was that tiny. He wasn’t about to lock Dylan in a closet. He just hadn’t realized the extent of it. He thought it had the potential to be a problem.

 

\--

 

There were a lot of reasons Connor preferred working with other people. He wasn’t super outgoing, but he also didn’t really like spending too much time on his own. That’s what he liked about working in a kitchen. He didn’t have to smile at customers, but there was a solid group of people he should shoot the shit with while they cranked out plate after plate of food.

 

He didn’t miss coming home smelling like a deep fryer, or the long hours, or all the time he spent on his feet.

 

Still, being alone with his house wasn’t the worst. He was trapped with his thoughts, but they were largely thoughts about his house. After building some competency, he figured out that there was plenty he could get done on his own, and waiting for Cam, his safety blanket, was just holding him back.

 

He had a good set up in the garage, the Skilsaw he’d finally broken down and bought instead of continually renewing it from the tool library (he was getting the feeling that he was overstaying his welcome) set up on a few saw horses. He was cutting pieces for the window trim on the inside. He’d gotten reclaimed windows, which he’d cleaned and hung with Dylan. It was starting to look like a house. Like his house. Really, it looked like a box with holes in the sides and house wrap stapled to it. The house wrap had been more challenging than Connor had anticipated.

 

Really, everything had been more difficult than he had anticipated. He started it knowing that it would likely be the hardest project he’d ever taken on, but he was being cocky even with that distinction. Building his house was a lesson in what he didn’t know. He didn’t even know how much he didn’t know when he started it.

 

He went back into the house to re-measure everything, because good lord for some reason he was bad at that.

 

He felt like he was putting more time, more energy, more brain power, into this house than he put into his degree. He liked the challenge. He would have liked it more if he had taken out a bunch of student loans to build it with, so he could remain blissfully uninformed about how much damage he was doing to his future finances. That strategy had worked to get him through his undergrad at least.

 

Connor was used to things being hard for him. He grew up in Cam’s shadow, and no matter how much he loved Cam, and how close they were, nothing changed the fact that Cam always knew the right decisions to make. The right degree to get, the right car to buy, the right way to take out loans for school that left him with minimal debt. The right freaking perfect dog to adopt. He knew that his mom never lacked love for him, and he knew that some of this was just because he was the baby, but he’d spent his life listening to his mom say things like “You know, when Cam was your age…”

 

If Connor was grateful for anything in his life (and he was grateful for a lot. He wasn’t an idiot) it was how easy it was to be with Dylan. Dylan wasn’t hard work, and when he was Connor didn’t even notice doing the hard work. He wanted to take care of Dylan. He wanted to be conscientious of Dylan’s anxiety and depression. He wanted to listen carefully to him complain about how unhappy his job made him. He wanted to put the work into getting Dylan to smile when he was sad.

 

Connor thought it was dumb to look at his relationship as an accomplishment, but he didn't have a whole lot else to look to.

 

His measurements checked out, and he went back to the garage to make his cuts. He’d gotten a miter box to make the angled cuts, and he and Cam had spent a few hours making practice cuts in order to make things perfect.

 

His house was an accomplishment. He’d made a plan, he’d done the research, he’d spent long hours sweating over it.

 

Dylan…well, Dylan just kind of happened.

 

\--

 

Connor regretted answering his front door immediately when he saw who it was. Really, what business did he have answering his mom's front door anymore anyway?

 

"Hi, Mrs. Mulligan," Connor said, trying to hide his disdain as he greeted his neighbor. 

 

"Oh, Connor, just the boy I was looking for. This is your little trailer that you're building?"

 

"Yes, Ma'am. It's a tiny house."

 

"Are you in business at all?"

 

"I'm not sure I'll ever build another one, if that's what you mean," he joked. He was getting kind of sick of every question anyone asked him being about his tiny house.

 

"Oh, what am I going to do with a tiny house. My daughter, Crystal, you remember her, she was a couple years older than you? Well, she and her husband are moving into a new house, and she keeps talking about getting a huge farm table for the dining room. Twelve feet. Sturdy. Etcetera. Those tables are so expensive, but I told her, ‘sweetie do you remember Connor McDavid? He's building things nowadays, maybe he can build you one.’ So that's why I'm here. I want to commission you."

 

"Oh, uhh, I've never worked on a commission before. Or built a table."

 

"Sweetheart, if you can build this small house then you can build a table." She pushed past him into his mom’s house, through to the kitchen where Connor's mom was sitting in her usual spot by the window.

 

"Kelly, I was just telling Connor what a good opportunity I have for him."

 

Connor watched as his mom's eyes went wide.

 

"Hi Margaret," she said. His mom, the best-intentioned of women, didn't really invite people into her house. Especially not neighbors.

 

Margaret pulled a notebook out of her huge purse and showed Connor the design that she and Crystal had drawn up together, apparently. She already had chairs for it, thank god, because she'd gone to a flea market and had fallen in love with a huge mess of them that she had no use for two years ago. They were sitting dormant in her mother's garage until she could get her own place.

 

"I actually think I could make this," Connor said. It looked sturdy, with flat top and an X-shaped support underneath.

 

"We want it a weathered white," she instructed. "Crystal's husband's parents have a pile of reclaimed wood from the old barn they finally tore down on their property that we want you to use."

 

Connor felt a little hoodwinked. Like the carpet had been pulled from under him.

 

"And we'll pay you a thousand dollars for it. The move in on the twenty-ninth. Could it be done by then?"

 

It was three weeks away. Connor thought about his empty garage stall, the tiny house that he was stalled out on because he didn't have the money to keep going on it quite yet. A thousand bucks could help him out a lot.

 

"Yeah, for sure. How am I getting this wood?"

 

"You have a pickup and a strong friend, right? I always see that handsome young man out here with you."

 

Connor blushed. Dylan was still asleep because he'd woken up with a headache. "Yes, ma'am, Dylan can help me with it."

 

"Alright, well, let's write up a little contract here alright? Your mom can be our witness." She scribbled a bunch of stuff on a piece of paper from her notebook. The price, the task, the due date. She said, of course, the due date was flexible as long as he communicated with her. His mom took a photo of the two of them together with the 'contract' before she left.

 

"The radar said nothing about strong winds this morning," Kelly said as they watched Mrs. Mulligan walk down their driveway to her house.

 

"For real. That woman is a tornado."

 

"I'm not sure how legal her legal proceedings are."

 

"But a thousand bucks…especially since I don't have to buy wood. Just some hardware."

 

"You want to do this?"

 

"I actually really like building things. And Dylan can help when I need an extra set of hands. I'll YouTube how to do that white weathered look they wanted. It's all over those home decorating shows."

 

"You could make some serious cash, kiddo."

 

"I wish it worked like that."

 

"Just stick a tiny house in front of your house and people will think it's okay to hound you for handy fix-it jobs."

 

"Maybe." Connor felt weird about it still. But he wasn't crazy enough to turn down a thousand bucks.

 

\--

 

Megan and Ryan were practically living at the Strome’s house since Elizabeth had been born, which meant that Dylan was the constant missing piece. Really, it just meant he started getting invited for dinner more frequently.

 

“They’re going to march me up to my room to clear my stuff out,” Dylan told Connor on the drive over. Connor had helped Mrs. Strome with hyper-vigilant chip bowl refilling and general clean up (including separating out all the neighbor’s street hockey gear from each other) during Canada Day, so he was her new favorite child. Except for Megan, who gave her grandbabies. No one else could hold a candle to that.

 

“Your parents might ask you to, but they’re not doing to like, hold a gun to your head. I’ll help. I’m getting really good at it.” 

 

“You have like, a pillow and a blanket and a change of underwear left,” Dylan said. “Every time I come over there’s less stuff, and at some point, you’re going to accidentally throw yourself away.” 

 

“Throw myself away into my tiny house, just the breeze at my back, all my things packed and with me. Like a turtle.” 

 

“I’m more like a beaver then I guess. I want a little stick mansion that doesn’t move.” 

 

“A structure that is more than willing to alter the nature around it?”

 

“Yup. Steady. Solid.” 

 

“Let’s just go eat some spaghetti squash and not worry about it too much, alright?” Connor said. Connor had this knack for noticing when Dylan’s screws started coming loose, and becoming the calm rational one to balance him. Dylan liked it. Were he alone, he’d rattle himself off his hinges.

 

\--

 

  
Dinner with a baby and a toddler was interesting. It was like dinner in a tiny monkey enclosure. Sophie kept taking things off of Dylan’s plate, sucking on them, and putting them back (gross), and Eliza Rose started crying the moment you even thought about putting her down. She just shifted from person to person, so there was at least some time for everyone to use a knife and fork like an adult. There was only one meltdown when Sophie was told to stop licking all of Uncle Dylan’s dinner, but it was enough.

 

“They’re a handful right?” Dylan’s mom asked Connor, who was sitting next to her and eyeing the baby in her arms with great suspicion. 

 

“Total handful,” Connor agreed, with the kind of relief that comes from finally being able to contribute to a conversation for the first time since sitting down. Even if his contribution was meager. He had his plate to himself though. Not that Dylan was jealous of him. Sophie was great. He liked everything about her except her bodily fluids. She was more than welcome to keep those to herself.

 

“Well, the magic of having your own is unparalleled. Ryan had his first at twenty-four,” she said, staring right into Connor's soul. “A great time to have kids. You’re young and you have all the energy in the world.” 

 

“Mom, cool it,” Dylan said, mouth full of salad. 

 

“I’m just saying that if you boys were thinking about it-”

 

“We’re not thinking about it.” 

 

“It would be convenient. I’m sure Megan and Ryan would let you borrow their infant car seat and-”

 

“Putting it on thick here,” Dylan said over her. He was horrified. Connor was white as a sheet, his fork frozen in the air.

 

“Smell this baby, Connor sweetheart,” Mrs. Strome said, holding Elizabeth out to him like she was a pie. 

 

“Smells…” Connor said, looking desperately for something to say. 

 

“Smells like a baby, we get it Mom,” Dylan said. “My nieces are cute. I hope you’re satisfied with Megan’s womb’s contributions to the next generation of Stromes, because Connor and I aren’t exactly about to have an oopsie baby or anything over here.” 

 

“Best oopsie of my life,” Ryan said, Sophie now licking the rest of what was on his plate from the position she’d taken up on his lap. He was beaming at her, letting her do it. He’d probably eat the food later too. Dylan could barely handle thinking about that. The difference between Ryan’s oopsie and a baby Dylan didn’t plan was that Ryan wanted to have kids eventually. He’d always wanted to be a dad. It was always something he talked about, imagined the future of his life to include. Dylan imagined the future of his life having a reasonably clean condo that he shared with an adult person he loved, and maybe a dog. Going on vacation. Maybe owning a car that’s less than ten years old.

 

“And we’re all very happy for you, just like we’re all very happy for Connor and I to not be expecting human life. Ever.”

 

“Well, ‘ever’ is a bit strong,” his mom said, and Dylan sighed. 

 

“C’mon, mom.” 

 

“I don’t even really have a real job, Mrs. Strome. I’m building a house that has a max capacity of two.” 

 

“Babies are so little though,” Liz said, holding the freaking newborn infant up like some kind of example of how compact humans start out as.

 

“You heard the man, no room at the inn,” Dylan said. He looked toward Ryan for help, his eyes desperate for a subject change. 

 

“I think that Aunt Cindy might beat us all in the weekly challenge this week,” Ryan said desperately. The Fitbit challenge was her Albatross.

 

“Cindy is cheating. I know for a fact that on Sunday she had a Harry Potter movie marathon with Caden and Marcie. There’s no way she’s beating me.” He face went from sweet, baby pushing grandma, to center ice of game seven, tied with a minute left on the clock. She looked like she’d kill a man. “We’re going on a family walk after this.” 

 

Dylan mouthed a ‘thank you’ at his brother.

 

“Oh, Connor sweetheart, if you’re not going to raise my grandchildren, the least you can do is join our Fitbit challenge group. Do you have a Fitbit?” 

 

“No ma’am,” he said, now a little frightened of her. Dylan didn’t blame him. The last time Dylan showed up at the house without his Fitbit on, there was hell to pay. 

 

“Well darling, you’re in luck, because I have an extra that I bought on accident and lost the receipt for,” she said, hauling Eliza Rose off into the kitchen, the sound of drawers opening and being riffled through drifting into the dining room. Dylan thought that his family was the only one who still ate dinner in the dining room instead of in front of the TV.

 

She came back with an unopened package with a black band floating in a clear plastic display enclosure. 

 

“Thought I was buying a small/medium, but it’s a medium/large. It will fit you, sweetheart. Now, you have to wear it at night too, so you can know how you’re sleeping. Dylan will show you how to get connected with our challenge group.” 

 

“You have to take it seriously or you’ll get kicked out,” Megan said, looking relieved to be baby free. Dylan understood why she liked it here so much. His dad cooked her dinner, his mom held the baby, and she got her body to herself for a few hours. He could respect that.

 

“No one has gotten kicked out,” Liz said a little too carefully.

 

“You asked your own niece to leave the group.” 

 

“Julie wasn’t taking it seriously,” Liz said.

 

“She’s twelve.” 

 

“And she should be competing with her peers, I think. Sounds more appropriate, right Daniel?” She asked her husband

 

“It’s your Fitbit group, my darling Ahab.” 

 

“Oh hush,” she said, but she was smiling.

 

\--

 

Connor knew he’d broken whatever boundary of politeness that lasts when you meet your boyfriend’s family for the first time when Dylan’s mother had started charging the Fitbit that she’d forcefully gifted him, and downloaded the app onto his phone for him. 

 

The device was slowly coming to life downstairs in the kitchen, and he was sitting on the floor of Dylan’s childhood room. It was basically a storage box.

 

“Your room in your apartment doesn’t make you look like a hoarder,” Connor said tentatively. The whole place was packed dense with crap that Connor couldn’t imagine Dylan needing anymore.

 

“Well, I’ve only been there a year and a half. I’ve been here my whole life.” 

 

“What is this?” Connor asked, picking something lumpy off of the bottom shelf of his bookcase, mostly filled with things that were not books.

 

“It’s an ashtray.” 

 

“That you clearly made, with love, when you were four.” 

 

“I was in high school,” Dylan said, defensively. 

 

“Do you need an ashtray?”

 

“I don’t smoke if that’s what you’re asking.” 

 

“Do you need a reminder of how awful high school was?” 

 

“It wasn’t all awful.” 

 

“It was good on the days you got to craft things you’ll never use out of clay.” 

 

“Shuttup,” Dylan said, a little pout on his face. He liked when Dylan let himself get cute and soft in front of him. They’d been dating long enough for Connor to see Dylan interact with a wide range of people. He was always surprised to see how serious he was around almost everyone except his family — and Connor. It was like he was a different person around the people he was closest to. Connor was addicted to the idea that he was one of them. 

 

Connor reached for the box of garbage bags that Liz had shoved into his hands on the way up the stairs, her eyes pleading. He knew he had a job to do here. He pulled a bag out from the box and shook it open. He very gently placed the ashtray in the bottom of it, and watched as Dylan’s eyes followed its trajectory from his own hands, to Connors, to the bottom of the bag.

 

Connor gave him time to process it. 

 

“What if I need it later?” 

 

“For what?”

 

“Memories.” 

 

Connor sighed. “Alright, get your phone out.” 

 

“Huh?” 

 

“Get your phone out and take a picture of it. You can’t use this. It’s taking up space. When you’re alone in your bed at night and you can’t sleep because you absolutely must look at the ashtray you made in your youth, you can open your photos up and gaze upon it’s...lumpiness.” He held the dish up on his flattened hands, and Dylan took a photo. “Now thank it for what it’s brought you, and put it in the garbage bag.” 

 

“What?” 

 

“It’s a technique from this Japanese tidying book.” 

 

“You read a Japanese book about tidying?” Dylan asked, one eyebrow raised all the way to the curly fluff that was his overgrown hair.

 

“It was life-changing,” Connor said. “In the bag,” he prompted. He wanted Dylan to be the one doing the throwing. Dylan carefully put the ashtray into the bottom of the garbage bag, then stared longingly at it. Connor pulled the edges of the bag up over it. 

 

They had thrown out one single item.

 

It was going to be a long night.


	8. Chapter 8

Days passed more quickly with a job and a project and a boyfriend. Connor was starting to be able to actually answer questions at the hardware store, to make recommendations about the best rollers to use with indoor paint, and which handful of tools could make up a decent toolkit if you just lived in an apartment or something. He had a favorite brand of hammers, for the way they felt in his hand.

 

He felt useful, which wasn’t a feeling he’d had since he’d helped coach mites hockey back in high school. College had felt selfish. Cooking had made him invisible. Connor, a typically shy personality, had the confidence to talk to complete strangers like they were trusted confidants when he had his Wayne’s apron on, his name carved into a nametag pinned over his heart. He had a few regulars who actually called him by name. Wayne himself had started calling him Davo, which felt endearing and sweet.

 

Dylan had sunk into the deepest crevices of his life. Connor was on Dylan’s family’s group text message thread, which doubled as a place Liz Strome talked shit about their Fitbit progress. He spent more nights in Dylan’s bed than his own. He was in Dylan’s Facebook profile picture, and photos of his tiny house clogged up almost all of Dylan’s Instagram feed. His brain connected every thought back to Dylan. He made up excuses to talk about him over dinner, to his co-workers, to Cam constantly.

 

He’d watched his friends fall in love and become completely annoying about it, but he didn’t understand that love was consuming. A tidal wave, a tornado, an active volcano. Connor couldn’t escape the grasp that Dylan had on his heart, and moreover, didn’t want to. He wanted everyone on planet earth to understand how he felt about Dylan, how powerful their love was. It couldn’t possibly feel this way for everyone, could it? But people killed and died over love every day, and Connor could understand why. He’d kill for Dylan. He’d die for him.

 

Connor had grown up camping, so a sleepover in the tiny house before they put in dividing walls the next day was a welcome suggestion to get him out of his head. It was Cam’s idea. He’d been sure to invite Dylan, but Dylan was keeping his distance from the inside of Connor's house, so it was a brother’s night. Connor needed it. They’d spent a lot of nights like that one as kids, the two of them sharing a tent while their parents shared the other before the divorce, using flashlights to draw shapes on the tent above them, and talk in the ways they couldn’t face-to-face when they were home in their normal lives.

 

They’d raided the garage and the basement for camping gear. They had a few sleeping bags and some heavy duty blankets in case it got cold during the Ontario summer night. There were snacks and bottles of water, and Connor predicted that one or both of them would have to pee off the edge of the trailer before the morning came.

 

The house was rough on the inside, despite looking decent on the outside. The floor was still just the subfloor, and Kelly had refused lending air mattresses without having a thick tarp underneath them, to protect from stray nails. The brothers set up their sleeping areas late, after they had eaten dinner with their mom and half watched the baseball game that was on in the living room to give them all a reason to stay together. Connor texted Dylan. Cam played a game on his phone. His mom was cross stitching something. When the game was over (the Jays won, but only by a single run), the boys headed out the kitchen door to the garage, laden with the things they would need for the night, Cam’s little golden ever at his heels.

 

Connor was tired from the day. He’d finished and delivered that dumb farmhouse table for Crystal, a woman who he legitimately did not recognize because she’d dyed her hair so drastically. There was excited screaming as Connor and Crystal’s husband brought the table into their dining room, and Crystal’s mom paid him in cash for it.

 

It was good to know he had that extra cash now, but he’d already spent it in his head, on his real front door and interior paint, even if he didn’t need those things quite yet. Still, it felt good to have made money building something, instead of just hemorrhaging it.

 

“Glad we did the skylight,” Cam said. They were settled next to each other the short way, like the wheels’ axels, each on their own air mattresses, Ella Mae in her rightful spot tucked into Cam. The skylight was over the loft, so it was hard to see with the space’s partition, but it helped the space feel less confined. It had been a last-minute add-on over the right side of the roof, over Dylan’s side of the bed. It had been expensive. Wayne didn’t recommend using reclaimed windows like Connor had used on the rest of his house to save money. The labor took a day because they hadn’t planned for it initially. Dylan was still wary of coming inside, and wouldn’t climb up to the loft yet. It was a work in progress. Connor just wanted it for when he was ready.

 

“Me too,” Connor said quietly. The ceiling of his house was a small little peak, and he was thinking of stringing little twinkle lights up there, because he thought Dylan might like that. He’d considered covering every interior surface in mirrors to make the space look bigger. He couldn’t stop thinking about how to get Dylan to like it. “I don’t think I could have predicted Dyl’s reaction to this place. I mean, I thought the tiny house was kind of the reason he liked me.” 

 

“The reason he likes you is because you’ll drive forty minutes to his house at midnight so you’ll have five minutes together before you fall asleep.” 

 

Connor knew Cam was also on his back staring at the ceiling, and thus couldn’t see Connor roll his eyes. He rolled them anyway. “It’s called being in love,” Connor said, which sounded sappy but was true. He wasn’t sure his brother had ever felt something like it. He’d sure kept it close to his chest if he had. Connor pulled the blanket over him a little closer to his chin, snuggling into it. “I just mean that the house is what brought us together.” 

 

“What do you mean?” Cam asked, rolling over to look at him. Connor thought it would be pretty rude not to do the same, and rolled to face him. 

 

“I mean, that’s how Dylan found me. Cause of the house.” 

 

“Vague.” 

 

“My YouTube videos.” 

 

“That no one watches,” Cam pointed out.

 

“People watch them now,” Connor said, which was true. He had a steady little climb of people who watched when he posted a new video, though it had been a while. It was hard to build a house and make a video about it. Maybe he’d make one the next day. 

 

“Didn’t Dylan start hanging around like, right when we started?” 

 

“He found the video we made about the subfloor and contacted me.” 

 

“Dylan is your internet boyfriend, is what I’m getting out of this conversation.” 

 

“I guess, sort of. It’s not like we’re just MySpace friends and talk over AIM. We have an actual relationship.” 

 

“I didn’t know you met online. I figured...I dunno, mutual friends or something.”

 

“Dylan likes finding the videos online that no one watches.” 

 

“Dylan’s weirder than I thought.” 

 

“Dylan is perfect.” Connor paused. “Dylan has depression. Did you know that? Have I told you that?” 

 

“I don’t think you have.”

 

“Those videos, the lost, lonely, unwatched ones - they’re like an echo inside of him, like his loneliness heard, you know? That’s how he describes it. I don’t really get it. I don’t have the echo. But I want to understand because I love him, and I want to be able to make him happy. And I know it’s insane to want to try to make him happy. Like, it’s a chemical imbalance in his brain, right? It’s not like me picking him wildflowers on a walk, or putting in a skylight for him is going to alter his brain chemistry.” 

 

“I doubt he’d expect you to.” 

 

“He doesn’t. I mean, I would if I could. I would do whatever in order to make him happy and comfortable. I would do whatever he needs.”

 

“You’re in deep. I guess I didn’t fully realize how…” 

 

“Consuming,” Connor supplies.

 

“How consuming this is for you.” 

 

“It scares me sometimes. The ferociousness I feel when I think about him. How I want to burn down his office building when he has a bad day, how I’ll drive twenty minutes out of my way and spend big money on that coconut ice cream he likes so much that you can only get at that boutique grocery store, even though I’m broke. It’s like I have too much of this feeling for my body. I’m only built to process so much, and this is a complete overload. I feel like it might eat me alive.”

 

“Shit,” Cam breathed.

 

“But it’s also the best feeling I’ve ever felt in my entire life. Dyl...he doesn’t like, complete my sentences or anything, but he listens and hears what I have to say. He’s needlessly silly because he likes it. He wakes me up in the morning, even when he’s feeling too low to even move, to even drag his body into the shower, because he knows how hard mornings are for me. He’s a really bad cook, but I still like eating the food he makes because he made it for me. Dylan is everything.”

 

“You feel healthy about this?” Cam asked. Cam was good at respecting Connor's feelings, carefully probing at the edges of him, without steamrolling.

 

“I’ve never felt more at home than when I’m with Dylan. He’s that place for me.”

 

“Sappy, oh my god,” Cam said, his older brotherly eyebrow-raising disturbing the seriousness of the situation right when Connor was pretty ready to be done being serious.

 

Cam sighed and tossed an arm over his eyes. “If I tell you something kiddo, you promise not to be mad at me?” 

 

“Are you pregnant?” Connor asked, trying to play with the levity Cam had injected into their conversation.

 

“I got a new job,” Cam said carefully. 

 

“Cool…?” Connor asked.

 

“Very cool. It’s in, um, New York City.” 

 

“It’s in New York City. Actual New York City, or the city that plays New York on TV?”

 

“Not Toronto.” 

 

“Alright, tell me about your new city job,” Connor said.

 

“You’re not mad that I’m moving?” Cam asked.

 

“I’d only be mad if moving would make you unhappy or something.” Connor knew that moving away was something that upset a lot of people. He was sure the news would make his mom cry. But Connor got it. That desire to pack up and check out something else. Something new. 

 

“For real?” 

 

“Means I have a place to stay in New York, right?” 

 

“Yeah, kid. Thanks for not being mad. I’ve been interviewing for it for almost four months. This place is completely crazy. I start at the beginning of September.” 

 

“Only a month away.” 

 

“Only a month.” 

 

“And you knew this was a possibility?”

 

“I was hoping for it.” 

 

“And you still decided to spend your last summer here in the cities helping your kid brother with his little project?” 

 

“Kind of the point of helping you. Fillin’ up my Connor tank while I can. You’ll have to come visit me though. Bring your boy, see the city.” 

 

“Dyl would like that.” 

 

“Even on a plane? A little metal tube hurtling through the air?” 

 

“He’s fine on planes, in cars. Even in elevators. I don’t get it, it’s not a rational fear.”

 

“Well, I’ll have to find a place first. I’m making more than I’m making now, but everything in New York costs like, six times more. I’ll have to adjust my brain to that. But I’ll get a place big enough for you and Dylan to come sleep on my floor.”

 

“You’re gonna have to Skype me too. Help me figure out plumbing or whatever I’m trying to do after you leave.” 

 

“I’m sure I’m the best resource for that,” Cam joked.

 

Cam told him about the people he would be leaving behind at his job, and how he heard that you can join rec hockey leagues in New York, though he wasn’t sure where they even put the ice. Connor told Cam about the lack of progress he and Dylan had made on Dylan's room, and how the deadline for the house to go on the market was approaching. About how he’d wasted a week of house building time on a stupid table, but it was worth it because money.

 

Connor had spent more time with Cam over the past few months than in the past several years, but while they spent whole days shooting the shit, talking about TV and music and their jobs, they didn’t get to talk like this often - where talking was the point, and not the filler. He’d been learning as much about Cam as he had about himself that summer. How Cam got patient when Connor got frustrated, how Cam had steady hands and a much more generous heart than Connor had ever given him credit for. How he still called their mom every Tuesday night after her shows to catch up. He thought he knew Cam so well because he’d grown up with him, but there were years missing while they were both in college. Years that changed and shaped both of them. Connor had always assumed that Cam was the one person he’d never have to ‘get to know’ ever again. 

 

But maybe that feeling was a constant with everyone you knew. You could only grow up so much before you started growing apart. You had to choose to come back together. Cam was leaving, and after Connor absorbed the news of it, he couldn’t imagine Cam staying here, in a job that was good but not what he wanted, in a town close to home because that’s where he just was. He wanted for Cam the same thing he wanted for himself: to be able to choose.

 

\--

 

Dylan didn’t love Connor because Connor was the same as him. He loved Connor because he was different. Often in spite of that.

 

His childhood bedroom had become piles of boxes and bags, sell/donate/throw piles overflowing. Dylan was stretched out on the twin bed he’d spent his whole childhood sleeping in, and Connor was digging through his memories.

 

“Alright, it looks like this box is like, paintings and stuff that you did as a kid,” Connor said, shifting through the shallow box that he’d pulled out from under Dylan’s bed. He knew Ryan had an identical box under his own bed.

 

“One of a kind,” Dylan said. “Keep forever.”

 

“What are you actually going to do with these paintings?”

 

“Remember how much fun I had in preschool?”

 

“Do you actually want them? Is it actually worth it to carve out a spot inside every future house that you ever have to store this box of childhood memories?”

 

“Um,” Dylan said, not really being able to say yes. He didn’t want to toss them, but he didn’t really want to cart them around through every move for the rest of his life. “I want my mom to keep them,” he said honestly.

 

“Why?” Connor asked. Dylan knew how much Connor liked throwing shit away. It felt like the thing he knew best about Connor at this moment in time.

 

“Because that’s her responsibility as a mom.”

 

“Okay, pick one drawing you love, and stick it in a frame for her or something.”

 

“They’re all frameable,” Dylan argued, before sliding down the bed, flipping to his stomach, and leaning off the mattress in order to dig through the box Connor was going through. “Okay maybe not this one,” he said, picking up a piece of paper with random lines on it. He kept sifting. “Most of this is crap actually,” Dylan reluctantly admitted.

 

“See? You don’t have to hold onto every single piece of your life forever.”

 

They sifted until they found a few things Dylan still thought were cool. Some drawings of dragons on lined paper, one painting that he did in art class that looked like a Mondrian. He took photos of the dragons, and decided that he’d frame the “Mondrian” for his mom. The rest he let Connor put in the throw pile.

 

“You wouldn’t have ever even looked at them again if we hadn’t just gone through them to throw them out,” Connor said, and Dylan rolled his eyes but didn’t disagree.

 

They went on a family walk after dinner (ribs and potatoes and grilled pineapple, which was leagues beyond what Dylan and Connor were used to eating lately) and listened to his parents talk about their house hunting and how they found a little townhouse that was a new build, and had all these features you could connect your smartphone to. They heard about Ryan and Megan’s kids, and listened to Ryan talk about wanting a third, and Megan looking at the back of his head like she was trying to kill him with her mind.

 

Connor talked about his brother moving to New York, and how excited he was for it. Dylan didn’t get it. Cam was like, the other half of Connor. He wouldn’t understand Connor as well as he did if he hadn’t gotten to know Cam too. He couldn’t imagine how distraught he would be if Ryan and Megan decided to move away. Family should stick together.

 

Liz grilled Connor on how he was liking his Fitbit, which he dutifully wore even though he didn’t really care about personal fitness data at all, and complimented him on how many steps he got in in a day. “That’s almost three times as many as our Dylan,” she said, giving Dylan a look.

 

“I have a desk job,” Dylan said, shrugging.

 

“Well, sitting is the new smoking,” she said. She’d sent him the article whose headline she was quoting, along with an article about yoga you could do while sitting at your desk, and one about scheduling ‘walking meetings.’ “Maybe you could look for a job like Connor's, where you don’t have to be a bump on a log all day.”

 

“I can’t afford to make any less money than I do,” Dylan said honestly. He didn’t mean it in a mean way, but he saw the way Connor's face fell. He knew Connor was sensitive about his job, about how he didn’t have the kind of job he could really support himself with. He wrapped his arm around Connor's shoulders and got a tentative smile from him.

 

“Well, Connor honey, we’re glad that your job makes you happy,” she said, a tiny piece of validation for Connor's job that he desperately needed to hear more often. Dylan was still mad at his parents for ripping his childhood from under his feet, but he appreciated how hard they were trying to make Connor feel comfortable, like he was one of them too.

 

“Yeah, I actually really like it,” he said, the tentative smile turning real, unguarded. “I know a lot of random things about bolts and power tools now, but it’s been good to have such good building resources. My coworkers are really smart. They always have an easier way to do whatever I need to get done.”

 

“Well thank you at least for having chosen a hobby that gets Dylan out of the house and on his feet. We keep telling him to join a rec hockey league or something, but our suggestions just fall on deaf ears.”

 

“I’m literally standing right here,” Dylan pointed out, hoping that his mom would stop being such a mom in front of Connor.

 

“And we love you so much,” she said, smiling her sneaky mom smile, giving his cheek a pinch. When she turned her attention back to her grandbabies, Connor pinched his cheek in the same spot his mom had.

 

“I love you so much too,” he whispered into his ear.

 

\--

 

It was embarrassing for Dylan that he had to have Connor put a skylight into his house to entice him to climb up to the loft. He still didn’t even feel comfortable inside the house to begin with, but he could do it if the front door was open, and he was close to it. He wasn’t being very helpful as Connor and Cam measured and strategized how to put up the walls that would separate the bathroom from the kitchen. The bathroom was small, a stand-up shower and a toilet, a small sink with a window above it instead of a mirror. There would be a small mirror mounted on an extendable arm by the side of the window.

 

Connor and Cam were tiling the bathroom that day, so Connor had given Dylan a pass to skip for the day. Dylan was never expected to show up and work. Connor made that abundantly clear. But Dylan liked the work. He liked the house in theory. He liked spending time with Connor. He liked watching Connor and Cam be brothers.

 

He did not like the idea of smooshing into the tiny bathroom to lay the tile that he and Connor had picked out — a matte, muted grey and green pattern. He liked how much his opinion mattered to Connor. Connor listened to his ideas, even the bad ones that obviously wouldn’t work. Being in Home Depot with Connor, the ceilings soaring, Connor's favorite Home Depot employee magically by their side as they walked through the hardwood flooring section pricing out options, while Taylor told them about the install process — they skipped the trickier ones, opting for the click — was the fun part.

 

Now, he answered Connor's photo texts of the progress from the floor of his bedroom closet. He hadn’t told Connor, but he was working on his tolerance for small spaces. He knew Connor wouldn’t pressure him beyond what he could handle, but he knew Connor wanted him to be able to spend time with him in the tiny house, wanted him to be able to sleep up in the loft with him. He knew that the skylight couldn’t have been cheap and that there wasn’t an abundance of budget to draw from for things that weren’t in the original plans. He didn’t know what Connor had sacrificed for it, but Dylan knew that he did it for him.

 

Still, the walls pressed in tight, the door open a crack for emotional reasons. His closet wasn’t any smaller than the elevator he took to get up to his top-floor apartment, but it felt different, psychologically, for whatever reason. It felt more like a cage, like a trap.

 

He breathed through it. He’d been in there for twenty minutes already, his phone in his hand, mostly playing a little RPG he’d downloaded, but also checking in on Facebook and Instagram periodically, when his on-screen character died.

 

It was hard to scroll through his friends and imagine any of them sitting on the floor of their closets, so they could become normal enough to want to spend time in their boyfriend’s tiny house that he was spending literally all of his money on.

 

Dylan scrolled through photos of food, photos of people on lakes, photos of beers, dripping with condensation.

 

He could usually focus in on the lie that was social media, and roll his eyes at the fact that everyone was creating their own highlight reel. He did it himself. The last thing he posted was a selfie of him and Connor, Connor oblivious behind him, carpenter’s pencil in his mouth, measuring tape stretched between his hands as he measured for siding. Dylan was lit well by golden hour sunshine, and Connor's shirt was sticking to his back and shoulders, showing off the definition they’d gained from months of carpentry.

 

Dylan was well aware of what he was posting. He wasn’t, for example, posting his thoughts from the inside of his closet, that was for sure.

 

He wasn’t sure how much longer he could take it, but his annoyance was because his closet didn’t have good lighting or a truly comfortable place to sit. He became aware of the fact that he wanted to get up and leave because he’d rather have his butt on the living room couch, not because he was suffocating in that space. There was no space in Connor's house that was smaller than Dylan’s closet. He knew. He’d read the designs. He’d measured his closet. The bathroom got close, but the bathroom would have windows in it.

 

He got up off the floor of the closet and pushed the door all the way open, his messy room waiting for him, Connor's crap pretty thoroughly mixed into his.

 

He wasn’t keen on the idea of spending a whole bunch of time in Connor's house, but he didn’t want Connor's house to lack this - the chaos of both of them. He didn’t want it to be a Connor-only sterile space. He wanted his dirty clothes to mixed in with Connor's clean clothes, and he wanted a charger for his iPad to be tucked into Connor's drawer of chargers. The boy he loved had chosen a small space. His boy’s small space had been at least the pretense of their connection.

 

Maybe he could, in fact, do it.

 

\--

 

If you asked Connor, he’d call it his ‘design inspiration.’ He would not call it a ‘mood board,’ and he would never refer to the fact that he spent almost every moment of downtime he had lately idly on Pinterest. Dylan made fun of him, but always followed up his smart comments with a kiss on his cheek.

 

It was hard not to spend almost every waking moment thinking about his house. It was the most expansive project he’d ever taken on. He gave up financial security for it, dragged his friends and family members into it, went to the hospital over it. It was very difficult for Connor to do things he didn’t want to do, but exceedingly easy for him to execute something he was passionate about. He double majored in four years because he took his classes and his education seriously. He loved school, which made it easy. Coming out of school was an ice bath shock to him, the realities of the jobs he could get with a double major in History and French not as appealing as going back for another degree.

 

Money kept him out of the embrace of academia, his passion eclipsed only by his financial good sense. Or the financial good sense that worked out in his brain.

 

“You’re thinking all white, and dark wood now?” Dylan asked, cheek pressed against his shoulder. It was time to really start thinking about the materials he was going to use for the interior for a lot of reasons. One obvious one was that he was scraping the bottom of his savings currently. He didn’t think he had enough for even the flooring, let alone the cabinets and kitchen appliances and the rest of the interior. He had a desk to build still, a seating area. He had storage solutions he wanted to create.

 

“I like how open the white makes everything feel,” Connor said, encouraged when Dylan snuggled down against him. It was Friday night, historically a night they spent at Connor's, because it was easier for them to both wake up basically on the build site. They were in the McDavid’s basement, where they spent almost all of their time when they were in Connor's mom’s house, the TV on in front of them that they were, per tradition, ignoring.

 

“I’ve been thinking it’s maybe time for me to actually like...enter your house without throwing up. Like...I want to see your bathroom tiles and stuff,” Dylan said mostly into Connor's arm.

 

They’d had a conversation nearly two months previous about how Dylan hated when people made big deals over little things. How the fear of someone making something into a big deal would often prevent him from doing the thing. He hadn’t joined a rec hockey league because he was afraid his mom was going to like, announce it to her social circle and make t-shirts or something. They’d talked about Dylan just secretly joining. He didn’t live under his parents’ roof anymore. Dylan seemed more inclined to approach it that way, the quiet way. Connor remembered. Connor kept his reaction small and quiet.

 

“Yeah? Want to go in the morning? Get the space in your head so you can help me pick out flooring?”

 

“We could just go now,” Dylan said, so fake casually that Connor had to suppress a laugh. He didn’t laugh though, because he knew that if Dylan wanted to go, past midnight when it would be dark and even smaller feeling, he must need to do it now. To get it out of the way.

 

“Yeah, babe. We can totally do that.” Connor helped extract them from the couch and grabbed a lighter and the few candles that his mom kept on the coffee table, even though she didn’t spend much time down there.

 

They walked upstairs, the house above them quiet. His mom rarely stayed up past ten, opting for coffee laden early mornings. Dylan’s hand gripped his tightly, a window into his anxiety.

 

Connor climbed up first, using a box to help him step up to the trailer. There were steps in the plans that he would probably build next, but he hadn’t gotten to it yet. He didn’t hover and watch patiently for Dylan to muster whatever courage he needed. He just dipped into his little house, and set down and lit the candles that he’d brought. The electricity was far from working.

 

Connor felt the trailer shift under him, the tell-tale sign of Dylan’s arrival.

 

“This isn’t so bad,” Dylan said, Connor settled on the floor and rested his back against the side of the house. He needed to put up some kind of actual interior wall still. He liked the lock-and-groove look, the horizontal paneling that was kind of in right now, and maybe easier than drywall. Until then, his back was up against the plywood. The candles flickered their lights into the interior, and Connor felt a spike of fondness that his little house could be pretty well lit by three scented coffee table candles.

 

He watched as Dylan’s gaze slid over every visible surface of the place. There wasn’t much to look at, but Connor thought maybe that would be the problem.

 

Slowly, Dylan sat down next to Connor, let his legs stretch out long and cross at the ankles.

 

“I have to remind myself every single day — multiple times — that I am not my neurosis. I can do whatever I want to do, and my brain can suck a dick.”

 

“You tell ‘em,” Connor said, stretching an arm around Dylan’s shoulders.

 

“It’s hard to be rational with anxiety though. With fear. Those things don’t speak the same language that I do.”

 

“I’m sorry I don’t...get it, as much as I want to be able to.”

 

“It would be nice to not have to explain it I guess,” Dylan started. “You only ‘get it’ by experiencing it though, and if you don’t experience anxiety or depression or whatever, then that’s fantastic. I would never wish this on anyone.”

 

“But?” Connor could almost hear it in his voice.

 

“But nothing. If you’re going to continue to be a person without anxiety and depression in a relationship with someone who has both, you can just continue being you. Because you’re good at it. Patient. Kind.”

 

“That’s because I love you.”

 

“That’s because you’re Connor. And you have a sweet heart.”

 

“I can be a dick.”

 

“Yeah, I know,” Dylan agreed.

 

Connor scoffed. “You’re supposed to dispute that,” he said, a pretend-shocked laugh echoing off the close walls. Dylan was trembling a little, had been since he’d walked in, but Connor felt the moment those trembles broke into giggles, the laugh Connor had thought was so damn cute the first time he’d heard it.

 

When their laughter died down, Connor expected Dylan to want to get up and go back to the basement, to the satellite TV, and the snacks, and the big couch. Instead, Dylan stayed put and told Connor about how his job was getting more oppressive by the day. How his two bosses kept telling him conflicting information. How everyone seemed to know what was expected of Dylan except for Dylan. There was no communication between levels, and Dylan missed deadlines for assignments he hadn’t known he had been assigned. He sounded miserable. He sounded sad, and Connor hated when Dylan was sad.

 

“Is there something I can do about it?” Connor asked, feeling helpless.

 

“Just. I dunno. Be here. Listen.” Dylan sounded small in the small house, an effect he hadn’t expected. He pressed a kiss into Dylan’s hair.

 

“Done,” he said, and let Dylan keep talking.

 

\--

 

Connor had learned that he needed to buy a little extra of everything because his fuck up ratio was a little higher than it probably should be. The siding went alright, especially after a few YouTube tutorials, and Cam’s extra set of hands when he showed up. Cam handed him and Dylan Iced Capps and he felt a lot calmer after that.

 

They got about halfway through it before they called it for the day, and Connor and Dylan decided to head to Home Depot to look at flooring and paint. Connor got everything he could from Wayne's, but Wayne's didn't carry everything. 

 

“I like the bamboo look,” Dylan said, running his finger over a sample. Dylan seemed to be doing mostly fine, though every once in a while he would say something like ‘there’s no way I’m throwing out all my old baseball cleats. I have every pair I ever wore,’ or something along those lines. Connor left it alone for the most part. He was glad to be in Home Depot, their space expansive, echoey even. Dylan hadn’t had another issue with his house that day, but he didn’t want to push anything.

 

“Bamboo is expensive,” Connor said, looking at prices. His budget was a little bit on track since he and Dylan had started living like poor people, which he appreciated from Dylan. He knew that Dylan didn’t have to eat bland pasta and rice and beans for every meal, but he did it without complaint. Still, he was conscious of what he had in his savings, and how much further he had to make it go. “My uh, savings is looking a little pathetic currently,” Connor said, broaching the topic carefully. He didn’t want Dylan’s pity or anything. He just wanted to be honest.

 

“Alright, so the laminate looks good too,” Dylan said. They browsed the aisles quietly for a second before Dylan looked at him, lip bit, and carefully asked if Connor would have enough to finish the project.

 

“Um...maybe? Everything is costing more than I thought it would,” Connor said honestly. “Especially with the Fuck Up Ratio,” he said. It was an official thing on their build site. Their inside joke. Gotta screw some things up. It was a less funny joke when applied to his budget.

 

“Do you…” Dylan started, and Connor knew that face. It was his ‘I’ll cover your gas,’ ‘I’ll grab dinner tonight,’ face that Connor hated.

 

“Nope. Dyl, not asking for help, just letting you know what the situation is.”

 

“Alright,” Dylan said. And to his credit, he dropped it. “What do you think about a bright orange door?”

 

“Bright orange?” Connor asked, letting himself be distracted from his budget issues.

 

“With that dark grey siding?”

 

He’d started this project thinking that the house would be his escape. Really though, Dylan was his escape. “Yeah. I think that would look nice.”

 

\--

 

Connor had reached a most certain and irrefutable point in his project: He was out of money.

 

He wasn’t completely broke. He just didn’t have enough money to purchase his flooring materials which were his next step. Beyond the flooring too, there would be maybe five grand worth of work he still wanted to do. He could make it livable with maybe three and a half.

 

He had several hundred dollars in his savings, but several hundred dollars was not enough.

 

He felt like he had two choices: Put the project on hold until he could save up enough to start again, or grovel.

 

Connor was sick of not feeling good enough. Some days he thought about the choices he had made: getting a liberal arts degree instead of something with direct real-world applications. Going to an expensive school. Taking a job at a restaurant instead of being an office temp. He hadn’t chosen a path of security. That’s why building his own house on wheels appealed to him. It would afford him the opportunity to fuck things up. And if the building process was any indication, Connor needed the room to fuck up. He needed space. He needed to be able to learn from his mistakes.

 

The thing about Dylan’s life that Connor was most jealous of was his independence. He was jealous of the roof that Dylan could afford to keep over his head, the groceries that came out of his paycheck, the money he could put into his savings account. Jealousy was ugly, especially when Dylan was so deeply unhappy himself.

 

If Connor took a break, put the project on hold, maybe until the winter was over (because let’s face it - nothing was getting done in the wintertime), it’s possible that he might have enough money saved up to finish the job. He’d also have that many more months of living under his mom’s roof.

 

If he...asked his mom for money — he shuddered at the idea — he would be paying her back for at least as long, but he’d have his own roof over his head. His mom made comments sometimes though, that made him think that she didn’t have the five grand to lend him that he needed.

 

“I need some big brother advice,” Connor said when Cam picked up the phone. Connor was in his childhood bedroom (a room that would never be just ‘his bedroom,’ but always ‘his childhood bedroom’) laying on his bed. He’d worked a long shift at Wayne’s. Ten hours, almost half of the hours that he’d work for the week. Dylan was coming over later, because the two of them were shameless, and bowed to the magnetic fields that dictated their lives now. They couldn’t spend that much time apart. They just couldn’t. He was freshly showered and already in sweats, and spending his time waiting on Dylan by having his third or fourth existential crisis of the week.

 

“Say you’re sorry,” Cam said automatically before Connor could say anything. “Say, ‘You’re right sweetheart, I was wrong.’ Practice those words.”

 

“Dylan isn’t mad at me,” Connor said, rolling his eyes at his brother, even though Cam couldn’t see him.

 

“Well, someday he will be, and you’ll remember that advice.”

 

“I’m actually calling you for financial advice.”

 

“That’s more up my alley,” Cam said, sounding more comfortable immediately. Connor could hear typing in the background. It was after seven.

 

“Are you still at work?”

 

“I’ve been kind of preparing my exit strategy,” he said. “It’s more time consuming than I would have thought. I’m glad I’m starting early.”

 

“I think quitting my job would take about five minutes, and that would include finding my name tag in between the seats in my truck.”

 

“You’re happy at work, right?”

 

“Yeah,” Connor said reluctantly. Even though he was happy at Wayne's, he wanted a job that garnered respect, even though he didn’t actually want to be a financial analyst, or whatever Cam actually did.

 

“Then stop worrying about what job you’re working.”

 

“My question is about that, kind of.”

 

“Shoot, kid.”

 

“I’m wondering if I should put my project on hold because I ran out of money, or if I should lower myself to asking Mom to give me a loan and just finish it.”

 

“I don’t even know what your question is, dude. Just ask. She gave me a loan when I first moved out of the house.”

 

“She did?” Connor asked. He’d remembered that move. Cam had graduated from college with a job already secured (a privilege that Connor had no experience with) and moved into a studio apartment. Connor thought he’d been set.

 

“Of course she did. I didn’t have a job in college like you did. I barely had any money when I graduated. Mom paid my first and last month’s rent and helped me buy like, dishes and a couch. It took me a year to pay her back.”

 

“Oh,” Connor said. “I didn’t know that.”

 

“She’d do the same for you. Or the equivalent, you know. Cause there won’t be room for dishes or a couch in your house.”

 

“Shut up,” Connor said, kind of glad to be teased. “So Mom helped you get on your feet because you’re the successful one. Mom has been letting me live in her basement and eat her food for three years. I feel like I’ve asked for more than her fair share of generosity.”

 

“How much do you need?” Cam asked.

 

“Like, five grand maybe? Really probably three-ish, but with my fuck up ratio, I’m thinking I’ll need a cushion.”

 

“Let me lend you the money,” Cam said.

 

“You’re about to move to New York. You need all the money you can get.”

 

“They’re paying for my moving expenses, and giving me a boatload of cash to work there.”

 

“Can you get me a job?” Connor joked.

 

“I’m serious, kid. Five grand? I’ll give you the loan happily. Working on your house this summer has been awesome. I’ve finally got biceps,” he laughed.

 

“Are you serious?” Connor asked. It was too good to be true, right?

 

“I’m serious as long as you’re serious about finishing your house and paying me back.”

 

“So serious,” Connor said immediately.

 

“Super serious?” Cam asked, teasing again.

 

“Yeah, however serious you need me to be, that’s how serious I am.”

 

“Do I get to help pick out your interior materials?”

 

“Nope.”

 

“Fair enough. I’m transferring the money as we speak.”

 

“You’re the best brother ever,” Connor said, meaning it with every fiber of his being in that moment.

 

“Never thought you would say that,” Cam said.

 

“Yeah, well it wasn’t likely after all the stitches I had to get in my head as a child because of you.”

 

“We’re all redeemable,” Cam said.

 

“Everyone has their price.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thank you to those of you who have been reading, and especially those of you who have been commenting. Hearing that you relate to this story that is so special to me is, well, so special to me. Using "special" over here like I'm trying to be Davo himself, but whatever. 
> 
> Almost done! Last two up tomorrow hopefully <3


	9. Chapter 9

Dylan knew that Connor didn’t exactly...get it. Dylan had been working through his depression since he was a teenager. He had so many coping mechanisms, which included his occasional mental health days, his meds, his therapy which he did in spurts, scheduling appointments when he needed them.

 

It also included a list of his ‘folk remedies.’ Good chocolate, like Harry Potter eats when he gets around demeanors, regular exercise, and YouTube videos. He knew the last one was a little unconventional, but every depressed person had an escape. He knew that Megan helped deal with hers by reading romance novels voraciously.

 

Dylan watched Vlogs, and robot builds, and ASMR videos which put him to sleep like meditating. And when he was feeling like he could handle it, he searched for the emotional lonely videos of people who had never found an audience.

 

He couldn’t do it too much. Usually, he had a bit of a lack of patience when it came to it. He had his favorite vloggers that he’d go to for comfort, people he felt like he knew since he’d watched some of these kids basically grow up on the internet, even though they had no idea he existed. That was his quick fix when he couldn’t muster the emotional energy to go digging. It took time; the searches bringing up mostly crap. But every once in a while he’d find a gem that made him keep doing it. A gem like Connor. Or the video he finally felt like he should show Connor.

 

Dylan had found it the week previous, in the hour between when he got home from work and when Connor brought over some leftovers from his mom’s fridge for them to eat, because they were both pathetic. He’d had some time to kill, and enough patience to start searching, so he used his random number generator, and plugged the numbers into the YouTube search.

 

The video he found was long. Vloggers had popularized videos that were shorter in nature, usually below the five-minute mark, heavily edited with jump cuts that eradicated the pause time that existed in regular speech patterns. This video was almost fifteen minutes. You never saw the person. It was a video of a hike through a wooded area along a stream, the person talking over the sounds of sticks crunching under her feet. Dylan isn’t sure how old the video maker is, and there are no other videos on her channel. She’s just talking about her day, the fight she had with her best friend about some vague jealousy. Like a lot of these videos, there’s knowledge assumed of the viewer, like it was made for a specific person or group of people, not a random person who found the video on purpose but accidentally.

 

That’s the video he shows to Connor.

 

Connor uses YouTube as a how-to resource, and a source of the hilarious viral videos he and Cam send back and forth, but that’s about it. He hadn’t even known about vlogging too long before he started doing it, which was obvious in the glacial pace he edited, keeping in his pauses and ums.

 

Dylan waited until the two of them were ready for bed. It was late on a work night, and they both had to wake up early. But they had always been in the habit of spending at least twenty minutes after they get in bed to talk about their days and reconnect and snuggle and kiss.

 

“Can I show you a YouTube video?” Dylan asked, Connor's head resting on the meat of his shoulder. He started the video up on his phone, holding it so they could both see. “I won’t make you watch the whole thing, but this is what I mean when I say that these videos are... I don’t know how exactly to explain it. I just feel like I’m doing something by witnessing it, you know?” 

 

“It feels like being heard when people watch your videos,” Connor agreed. He’d been posting less, his videos a little less personal and disclosing. More focused on the progress and process of building his house than on the emotional stuff surrounding it. Dylan didn’t want to ask about it, but he thought maybe it was because before, Connor desperately needed a friend. Now he had Dylan.

 

“Okay, so this is like a diary entry or something,” Dylan said, hitting play.

 

On the screen, the camera bounced around, presumably in the hands of someone walking, holding the camera to record their own view of a stick-lined path, trees dense, but branches spaced enough to see the sky.

 

“There’s nothing to do around here without a car,” a voice says. She’s young probably, whiny like a teenager, with a southern accent. “You don’t notice how much your best friend is your chauffeur until you don’t have a best friend anymore.” She pauses, the sound of cracking sticks and dry leaves beneath her feet. The creek she’s walking past is flowing, but the sides are dry, like the water levels are low.

 

Nothing interesting happens for the three minutes Dylan makes Connor watch with him. The young woman keeps talking about her issues with her friend, about how no one knows anything about loyalty anymore, and when there’s a long pause after she talks about wanting to get out of her town, Dylan pauses it and puts his phone to sleep.

 

“She sounds lonely,” Connor said.

 

“Yeah, right? She sounds lonely, and watching that makes me feel lonely too. Makes me recognize what I’m feeling. But it also makes me happy, because it feels like I’m not alone, right?” 

 

“Alright, yeah, that makes sense.” Dylan doesn’t think that Connor gets it. But he’s glad. Heartened that he tried.

 

\--

 

Dylan’s office is always a tornado in the morning. Everyone showing up at roughly the same time for every company in the skyscraper he works in. Once he actually gets to his desk though, he usually feels calmed by his routine of getting coffee from the break room and eating the granola bar he packed in his lunch bag while checking in on the emails that came into his inbox since he left the night before.

 

He’s still feeling that soft warm waking-up-next-to-Connor feeling that he’s still not over when he sees that he has a meeting request in his Outlook for eight-fifteen. He never has meetings scheduled that early. Usually, they give everyone an hour to get their shit together and actually wake up.

 

Instead, Dylan grabs his mug of coffee, a notebook, and a pen and heads down to conference room C, noticing that the other people heading down are the fellow temps. That’s at least a little normal. Sometimes someone from their agency comes to meet with them about progress updates or...whatever. It’s happened before.

 

When Dylan sits down at the conference table, he notices that his boss is talking to Amy from OfficeTemps, so he relaxes a little.

 

It’s a couple minutes until everyone invited to the meeting is there, and he’s right. It’s just the faces Dylan recognizes as the other temps. None of them have been there for as long as he has though. He feels a little like a temp dinosaur. Everyone else he was brought on with has moved on to a permanent job or a new opportunity. Dylan’s just treading water.

 

“Good morning, my brilliant folks,” Amy starts. Dylan’s met Amy twice, and she’s gotten his name right both times. She’s incredibly good at faces. She’s in a black skirt-suit and a blush pink blouse, her hair perfectly in place. Dylan reaches up to smooth his own hair down a little, the mess of it long enough to curl a little at the ends. “I’m here to firstly thank you all for all the hard work you’ve put into this position. You guys are why OfficeTemps is the best temp agency in the country. We only take the best and most talented.”

 

Dylan recognized this speech immediately for what it was: it was the breakup conversation. Dylan felt his stomach drop.

 

“Thanks to you guys, MortgageTech is completely caught up on their backlogs of work needing to be analyzed. Their team members are going to be able to handle their work volumes on their own now.”

 

Dylan heard the woman next to him, Gracie, who sat three cubes down from him, whisper ‘shit’ under her breath.

 

“Unfortunately that means that your assignment here is coming to an end. However, Miles has talked up all of you so much. We’re going to try to get new placements for all of you guys soon. This week or next week we’re hoping. We’re working on some leads right now. For now, we’re going to have you clean your desks out and head out. You can turn in your desk keys and access badges at reception. You’ll be paid for the whole day.”

 

Dylan’s boss Miles stood up to stand next to Amy, and said some crap about how much he appreciated how much work they had all put in to get them caught up with volumes. Dylan could barely even hear him. He had just spent almost an hour on the train to get there, and now he had a banker’s box waiting on his desk when he got back to it. He didn’t need it. He took down the picture of him and Connor from his cube wall, grabbed the extra hoodie he kept for colder days, stuffed the emergency cold medicine into his messenger bag and left, coffee mug in his hand.

 

He felt like a zombie. He knew when he stepped off the elevator into the vast marble lobby that he wouldn’t be able to go back up. No access card meant no elevator.

 

He knew Amy would call him soon and let him know that they had found him another position at another company. It had happened before. The first few months he spent temping he bounced around a lot. He was still living at home, and they put him on smaller assignments until he got enough positive recommendations to get a better assignment. He had been at this position for fourteen months. He had been thinking that they maybe would hire him full time.

 

He held his mug of coffee, still warm, as he got back on the train to the park-and-ride where his car was waiting for him. He felt numb. He wasn’t sure he was okay to drive. He sat in his car for a minute or two. He didn’t want this life. He didn’t want to worry about getting reassigned. He didn’t want to worry about missing out on the week of pay that he needs to make his rent.

 

Shit. His rent. He’s going to have to dip into his meager savings to cover that.

 

He cranked the key in his Jetta, the radio coming to life with the air conditioning. There was something comforting about the way his car smelled — like crayons. The way it hummed around him. At least his car was paid off.

 

He pulled out of the park-and-ride and drove. He wasn’t thinking about where he was going, but suddenly he was on the highway headed toward Newmarket. Connor had a shift, but. Well, Dylan needed him.

 

The radio played pop songs that Dylan tuned out. He knew that when Connor had lost his job, he had the security of living with his parents. Dylan didn’t have that option anymore. Connor had helped him pack his entire childhood into two Rubbermaid storage bins that he tucked into his closet. His parents' house was officially going on the market that Friday. They’d put in an offer on a condo.

 

When he got to Wayne’s, he parked next to Connor's truck and flipped down his car’s visor to wipe away his tears. His eyes were still red though. He looked like shit. He sighed and walked into the hardware store.

 

“Dylan,” an older man said, recognizing him right away. His name tag said Wayne. Dylan hadn’t met him before. “Don’t be alarmed, it’s hard to get Connor to shut up about you, honestly.” Wayne looked up from the register he was sitting at to see if he could locate Connor in any of the aisles. When he couldn’t, he just shouted for him.

 

Connor gasped when he saw Dylan was there. “Baby,” he said, voice full of worry already. “What’s wrong?”

 

“Hey kiddo, it’s slow here today. Why don’t you take the rest of your shift off?” Wayne said, looking at how fucking awful Dylan looked. Connor just nodded and handed over his apron. When they got outside the doors of the hardware store, Connor pulled him into a crushing hug.

 

“What happened? Are you okay?”

 

Dylan focused on the way Connor felt against him. Warm and familiar. Like home.

 

“I don’t have a job anymore.”

 

“Oh, sweetheart.”

 

“I mean, I’m sure they’ll find me a new assignment, but I had been there for so long. I thought they were going to hire me?”

 

“They’re idiots,” Connor said loyally.

 

“I just don’t want to do this shit anymore. Waking up every morning trying to ignore the feeling of uncertainty, you know? I just want to have a fucking job.”

 

“Let’s go get some junk food and hang out in my bed okay?” Connor asked, and that’s fucking exactly what Dylan wanted. He’s in self-pity mode. He could feel his happiness crash below his baseline.

 

“I like Wayne,” Dylan said. “He recognized me.”

 

“I’ve shown him about a thousand pictures of you. Plus he watches my YouTube.” Dylan felt a layer form on top of his sadness. A syrupy fondness for Connor that seemed to eclipse everything else. An appreciation for the fact that Connor had found another person who could take care of him, who gave a shit about Connor's happiness.

 

“Are you going to get in trouble for me showing up like a fucking mess at your job?”

 

“Naw, baby,” Connor whispered into his hair. “Wayne is a person. He knows people have lives outside of their jobs. I’ll offer to come in an extra day next week to help stock or inventory or something. I’m glad you came to me.”

 

“Nowhere else I’d rather be.”

 

Connor led him back to his truck and told him they’d pick up Dylan’s Jetta later.

 

Dylan was grateful. He didn’t want to drive his car alone back to Connor's house. He wanted to sit in Connor's passenger seat and let Connor decide the way they were going home. They stopped at the grocery store and picked up a frozen pizza, and Pringles, and chocolate covered pretzels, and Connor refused to let Dylan pay for any of it.

 

Connor's house was quiet when they got there, his mom on shift at the clinic. His house was as familiar to Dylan as his own at this point, the smell of it friendly and comforting. Dylan immediately stripped off his slacks and his button up, letting them melt into a pile of wrinkles that Dylan didn’t care about. He never wanted to put them back on. Connor followed suit until they were just in t-shirts and boxers. Connor set up his iPad on his side table so they could watch TV as they cuddled and snacked. Connor let Dylan cuddle against his chest, and gave him a scalp massage while they watched old episodes of Breaking Bad until Dylan was relaxed enough to fall asleep.

 

When he woke up he still didn’t have a job, but Connor was still there. Breaking Bad was playing on auto, at least two episodes from where they had left off.

 

He felt like his world was collapsing, Connor the only stable point.

 

At least it’s the one thing he would have picked to stay steady while everything else was collapsing around him. The only thing he truly couldn’t stand to let go of.

 

\--

 

They napped. Connor made them mac and cheese, and turkey and avocado sandwiches. They drank iced coffee on the front porch, looking out at Connor's house sitting in the circle drive. They’d install the flooring that weekend. Then it was just finishing touches. Getting things operational and pretty. The plumbing in the bathroom was all done, the kitchen was ready to get appliances, cabinets, and countertops. Connor thought there was a month, maybe a month and a half left of work.

 

They watched the Mighty Ducks on the basement couch, and Dylan was falling asleep on Connor's shoulder so they moved back to the bed. Connor stayed with him until he was asleep again, and he heard his mom come home from work. He had an idea.

 

His mom had an armful of groceries when he ambushed her.

 

“I have a problem and a solution, but you need to be on board for it,” Connor spat out. He was bad at subtlety and had no patience. He knew this about himself. He was pretty sure that those combined qualities are what helped him get shit done.

 

“Let’s hear it,” she said, setting the groceries down on the island and starting to put things away in the pantry. She knew Connor too.

 

“Dylan’s temp position ended and now he’s worried about paying his rent but his parents are selling their house and downsizing, so I thought he could move in here until the tiny house was ready and then he could move in with me.”

 

His mom paused, the silence heavy in the room. Connor was nervous that they might think that his perfect plan was flawed.

 

“Oh honey,” his mom said, her face readjusting into her concerned mom face. “You kids just have the shitiest luck when it comes to jobs, don’t you? Of course Dylan’s welcome here. He’s not getting another temp position?”

 

“I don’t think he wants another temp position, you know?” Connor said, finally peeking over the edge of a paper grocery bag to assess how best to start helping. He started sorting the produce out of the collection of bags, and his mom grabbed the vegetables to put in the fridge.

 

“I was a temp out of college too,” his mom said. “Before deciding to go to nursing school.”

 

“I didn’t know that.”

 

“It was rough. Of course, I didn’t have the student loans that you kids have these days. Dylan can stay as long as he needs it. I was just thinking about how this house has gotten a little too quiet since Cam moved out.”

 

“He’s sleeping downstairs now. I can ask him to stay?”

 

“Of course honey. And I’m making tacos so ask him if he wants hardshell or soft.”

 

\--

 

Dylan was awake and on his phone when Connor came back to his room. He wondered if Dylan got the same rush that he did when he saw Connor in his bed. Seeing Dylan tangled in his sheets always made his heart feel too small for all his feelings.  

 

"Your mom’s home?” He asked, looking up from his phone. His eyes sat dead on his face, the stress of the day present in every breath. Connor slipped back in bed next to him.

 

“Yeah. She wants to know if you want hard or soft shell tacos.”

 

“Two of each,” Dylan said and snuggled close.

 

“I have an idea,” Connor said, combing his fingers through Dylan’s messy hair.

 

“I’m not building a tiny house.”

 

“Ha ha. Move out of your apartment. Get someone to sublet. Move in here, with me.”

 

“You want me to live in your mom’s basement?”

 

“It’s not like she’s using it.”

 

“Does she know you have this weird crazy idea?”

 

“She’s on board.”

 

“We’ve only been together for a few months and you want to move in with me?”

 

“It’s been easily six. Seems like forever though, right?” Connor asked.

 

“Yeah. It does.”

 

“And then when the tiny house is ready we can move in there. We can take it wherever we want. We can get part-time jobs wherever we want to. Operating costs are almost zilch.”

 

“You want me to live in one hundred and sixty square feet with you?”

 

“Yup,” Connor said.

 

“Where’s all my stuff going to go?”

 

“You could keep it here. My mom isn’t moving anywhere anytime soon. She loves this neighborhood. She loves her house.”

 

“Do I need to pay her rent?”

 

“Naw. Maybe do the dishes every once in a while,” Connor said.

 

“This is insane and kind of pathetic. ‘I live in my boyfriend’s mom’s basement.’ That’ll impress everyone.”

 

“You’re not here to impress anyone. You’re here to seek happiness. Even when that happiness doesn’t look like something you’d brag about on social media.”

 

“That sounds wise.”

 

“It’s the thing that maybe I tell myself every day.”

 

“You’re so fucking cute.” His words were muffled by Connor's shoulder.

 

“So that’s a yes? My closet is all cleaned out. There’s plenty of space for your stuff.”

 

“How crazy is this?”

 

“Just as crazy as taking another temp assignment just to pay the rent on an apartment you’re constantly stressing about paying for.”

 

“Fair.”

 

“I’m pretty sure all your stuff would fit in the back of my truck,” Connor said. “You could sell your bed and your dresser. The living room furniture is Drew’s right?”

 

“Yeah…”

 

“See? This is perfect. Just sell your bedroom stuff to the person you get to sublet.”

 

“You’re making this too easy.”

 

“Not everything needs to be hard, baby boy.”

 

Dylan hesitated.

 

“Choose happiness. And if you don’t like this basement, or the tiny house, or living with me, or whatever, then you can just spend that time looking for a new job and saving up for your own apartment again.”

 

“Who wouldn’t want to live with you?” Dylan said. “You smell nice and you don’t hog the blankets.”

 

“True love.”

 

“Yeah, I think so,” Dylan said smiling.

 

“So yes.”

 

“I fuckin’ guess so.”

 

\--

 

It was easy to find someone to sublet, especially at the beginning of September, when school was just about to start. The grad student who took over Dylan’s half of his lease also agreed happily to buy his furniture from him. He seemed nerdy and quiet and Drew approved. Drew understood, thankfully. He and Dylan had found each other on Craigslist, so he wasn’t too scared to go that route again.

 

Connor was right. All of his stuff fit in Connor's pickup and Dylan’s Jetta. Connor's mom helped them unload their cars, and reminded Dylan to change his address so he could get his mail there. Then she took them both out to get burgers to celebrate.

 

Dylan couldn’t believe that she actually wanted him there.

 

“My mom likes you, believe it or not,” Connor said. “She likes that I’m still there. She’s proud of Cam of course, for getting the kind of job nobody with a degree in history has ever received, but I think she would be just as happy if he had also stayed in their house forever.”

 

“Isn’t the goal to get your kids out of your fucking house?”

 

“Maybe for some parents. I think my mom is going to like, I don’t know, adopt a lot of dogs or something when I finally leave. You’re helping prevent my mom from becoming a weird dog person.”

 

“No adopting more kids?”

 

“I’m not ruling that out honestly. My mom needs hobbies and her favorite hobbies have always been her kids.”

 

“Maybe she should go to one of those wine-and-painting nights.”

 

Dylan’s phone buzzed. It was Amy from OfficeTemps. He ignored the call, but showed Connor who was calling.

 

“She’s been calling me a lot…” Dylan said. “Leaving messages that I haven’t been returning.”

 

“New positions?”

 

“Yeah. Short assignments.”

 

“You should just call her and tell her you’re not looking for another temp position right now.”

 

“Or I could just let her figure it out on her own.”

 

“That’s not how you’re going to dump me, is it?”

 

“I dunno. Am I your temporary boyfriend? Is my assignment almost up?”

 

“Very funny,” Connor said.

 

“So don’t worry about it.”

 

“Did my mom help you with your resume?”

 

“Yeah, it looks better now, I guess.”

 

“Are you on the permanent job hunt?”

 

“I’m taking a break from my life, I think.”

 

“What are you going to do?”

 

“Cry in my boyfriend’s mom’s basement.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“Okay?”

 

“I just mean, if you need some time, take some time. That’s the point of this. Not making yourself miserable with a shitty job in order to get money. The point is to like, live a frugal life so you can make decisions like ‘I need some time.’”

 

Dylan pushed Connor over onto his back on the couch and crawled up him to press kisses all over his face.

 

“How are you so good to me?”

 

“I love you.”

 

“Yeah, but I’m a drag.”

 

“You’re more fun than you think you are. And love isn’t about loving someone who’s happy all the time. It’s about finding someone who you want to find happiness with. Together.”

 

“The internet is a beautiful place.”

 

“The GTA is a beautiful place.”

 

“Shut up,” Dylan said, resting his cheek on Connor's chest, his shirt soft on Dylan’s cheek. It felt dumb, like the path he was choosing by doing this wasn’t the one that he had signed up for when he left his childhood home to go to school, and then again to work a ‘real job.’ But maybe everything didn’t have to be hard. Maybe Connor was right.

 

\--

 

Dylan was used to having something productive to do with himself every day. Even during summer breaks in school, he had sports or camps or jobs or internships or summer classes. He was restless, and Connor had no idea why.

 

"Just like, do something," Connor said. He was researching table saws on the internet. He wanted his own now, even though if his house was this close to being done and his space was going to be so small, he didn't really need one. But Connor had the bug. He wanted to build more shit. He wanted to try his hand at making more furniture. Maybe he could sell it on the side. He'd made Cam a wooden six-pack holder with a bottle opener on it out of scraps of crap he'd fucked up on for his house, and he'd liked making the little project on his own. He was good at finding ways to fill his time. And the farmhouse table he’d cranked out for his neighbor had brought in some welcome cash.

 

"Do…something. My brain is burnt out from job searching and if we watch any more of this Ghosthunters marathon I'm going to combust," He was already fidgeting on the couch next to Connor. Connor wanted to shove a Rubix cube in his hands or something.

 

"Make a YouTube video," Connor said. He didn't understand why Dylan never had. YouTube was his obsession. His salve.

 

"Make a video no one is going to watch? I already struggle with depression. I don't need any more reasons to hate myself."

 

"You got my videos more views," Connor pointed out. "Tags or something?"

 

"Your videos are about something," Dylan said. "Mine would just be like, me whining."

 

"Mine are just whining and people watch them."

 

"Whining about a tiny house. Not whining about all of the struggles of being a white man."

 

"Stop invalidating your feelings. If you don't want to do it, don't do it. I'm just saying — I don't know. I support you and I want you to be happy. And I just thought this might be something you might like doing. My channel has been doing much better since you started putting those tags on my videos and doing titles and thumbnails and stuff."

 

"I saw you got a mean comment the other day," Dylan said it as though that was enough reason not to do it.

 

"It's the internet. Everyone gets mean comments. Plus, I'm a white man. It's not like I'm a teenage girl. They're not actually going to threaten you."

 

"Point."

 

"Just do it," Connor said. His eyes were on his computer screen where he was editing a spreadsheet of potential saws. Still, he saw Dylan out of the corner of his eye. A tiny, though distinguishable nod.

 

"Fine. I'll try. But you have to lick my wounds when I fail."

 

"I'll lick more than that," Connor said, the tease coming naturally. Connor could almost always get Dylan to smile.

 

It worked.

 

\--

 

When Dylan got to Mitch's house, his room was completely transformed. One of his roommates was hooking up a boom mic.

 

"What is going on?" Dylan asked. There was a clearly staged area, lit softly to look like daylight or something.

 

"Trevor makes films," Mitch said, shrugging. "He said he'd help. He wanted to test out his new boom anyway."

 

"I just wanted to film this on my phone," Dylan protested. He didn't have a computer that had enough processing power to edit this kind of video file, nor did he have the software.

 

"Yeah, I'll edit this one for you. Maybe we could film two, one on my camera just so I can test out that all my gear is talking to each other, and one on your phone. I can show you how to rig up a cheap lighting kit for your own space."

 

"Hi Trevor, I'm Dylan," he said, wanting to slow things down a little.

 

"Oh yeah, we've met before. You ate my Reese's Puffs that one time."

 

"Oh. Hey." Dylan remembered that time. He had hoped it was an anonymous illicit cereal eating, but he guessed not.

 

"So do you know what you want to talk about?" Trevor asked as Mitch herded him into a floral chair that Dylan guessed had either been dug out of a dumpster or had been in this house since it was built.

 

"Um, I guess, I could come up with something. I wasn't thinking we'd actually be filming." He shot a look at Mitch. He'd said he just wanted to talk to him about the idea about a thousand times.

 

"Well, we're all set up here, so you might as well just go for it."

 

"I feel like I should get a little drunk for this," he said.

 

"All I've got is cheap beer," Mitch said.

 

"I was kidding."

 

"Oh. Of course. Me too." Dylan knew he was not kidding.

 

"Just pretend we're not here," Trevor said, in the manner of a camera operator. "But look into the camera." It was a DSLR on some kind of intense looking mount.

 

"Just…pretend. Okay."

 

Dylan cleared his throat. He knew without his anxiety medicine, he would have already been out the door. But his drugs just made him care less about the petty shit that he used to worry about a lot. Like what a theater geek and a filmmaker would think of him. Especially because Trevor was shooting some serious heart eyes at his new mic.

 

"Hi internet. I'm Dylan. I think I'm going through a quarter-life crisis."

 

\--

 

He recorded two vlogs that day, both of them on his phone which Trevor, of course, had a mount for, and one on both his phone and Trevor's camera. Trevor said he'd edit that first one and send it over to him, but Dylan was pretty sure he'd make his own cut from the footage on his phone. He was self-conscious about starting his channel with a really high-quality video and then dropping down immediately to phone quality. Plus, he wanted to edit it himself. He knew a lot of style came through editing. He just wanted it to be his.

 

Connor was in his tiny house staining the cabinets, every window open for ventilation and a mask over his face. Dylan couldn't handle the small space and the oppressive smell. Plus Dylan knew that Connor needed some alone time with his own house. It was his meditation. Dylan wanted something like that.

 

He'd set his channel up already when he'd agreed to start making videos. He thought about a title forever. It seemed so important, especially after harping on Connor about it all summer. He settled on "An Introduction to a Quarter Life Crisis," and decided to move on with his life. He added tag after tag to it until he was satisfied, and hit post.

 

He immediately wanted to pull his video back to him, through the internet and back into the privacy of his own phone. What if someone he knew watched his video? What if one of his high school or college friends saw how much he was struggling? The video was the opposite of what he was used to people putting onto the internet. It was not his highlight reel. It was a rambly overview of everything in his life he felt frustrated and confused by.

 

He put his phone down instead of deleting the video. He shoved it under his pillow on Connor's bed and went upstairs to distract himself. He was still getting used to living in the McDavid’s house, but Connor’s mom was always so nice to him when he ran into her that he figured he was the one being weird about it.

 

"Hey sweetie, is Connor still in his house?" Connor's mom always seemed to be in the kitchen. She wasn't baking or cooking anything at the moment. She usually wasn’t. She was sitting in this huge overstuffed chair with a big ottoman in the corner by her windowsill herb garden, her iPad in her lap, reusable water bottle shoved between her and the arm of the chair. Dylan was pretty sure that Kelly just liked it in the kitchen because it was her command center.

 

"Yeah, he's staining."

 

"You know, when he started that project and said he wanted to build it in our driveway, I said yes because I wasn't taking into account that the person asking us permission to do this was Connor. I kind of assumed he'd get interested in something else and move on."

 

"He's like Ahab," Dylan said. He couldn't see Connor or the house from where they were in the kitchen. The windows faced the backyard.

 

"That's, unfortunately, a good parallel for him. He's always been like this. Driven by obsession."

 

"Sometimes I feel like that obsession is pointed at me. And it's going to fade."

 

"Oh, sweetie. I've known Connor his whole life. There's the way he is when he's obsessed with something — all-consuming and honestly pretty annoying at some points. And then there's the way he is when he loves something. It's enduring. I can tell you that he's obsessed with that house. But he loves you."

 

Dylan blushed. He was already feeling vulnerable since posting his video online, his phone in the basement collecting good or bad attention. Or worse: no attention. There were some moms that felt like someone's mom. The mother to a particular person. And then there were some moms that seemed like everyone's mom. Mrs. McDavid seemed like that kind of mom. The parent who would volunteer for recess monitor and comfort the kid who scraped their knee like they were her own, even if her own kid wasn’t even in that class.

 

"There's a frozen pizza in the freezer if you're hungry," she offered. It was such a contrast to his own house, where frozen and processed foods were hard to come by, simply because his dad was so obsessed with cooking. Some people had regular relationships with food. Dylan was still getting used to that.

 

"I'm going to check in with Connor first. Thanks, Kelly."

 

\--

 

Connor was on his side, a rag in his hand, lovingly staining the baseboards around his cabinets. The smell of the stain kept Dylan out of the house, but he stood on the small porch out front and poked his head in.

 

"You want a frozen pizza?"

 

"Sure," Connor said, looking up from staining to look at Dylan. Dylan loved being on the receiving end of that look. "Hey, I watched your video."

 

"How did you even know I posted it?"

 

"I have notifications on your channel, duh." Connor carefully put the lid back on his stain and set his rag down on the plastic he'd been laying on so he could go over to Dylan. "You're amazing."

 

"So the one view I have on it will be from you, huh?" Dylan tucked his face down into Connor's neck and Connor laughed.

 

"You've got more than one."

 

"It's been like, twenty minutes."

 

"The internet moves fast."

 

"Alright, bait-y mcbait bait, gimme." He held his hand out for Connor's phone, and Connor pulled the video up and handed it over.

 

It had forty-eight views. It even had a comment from 'mrjax43.' _Word, dude_.

 

"Word. Dude," Dylan read aloud.

 

"It means that what you said resonated with someone at least. That's pretty cool."

 

“I know what ‘Word, dude’ means.”

 

Dylan hadn't really been thinking that he would post the video on the internet and immediately become famous but…okay, that's kind of what he was thinking. He'd either be completely ignored or be a big deal, right? He had a limited imagination as to what the actual outcome would be.

 

"When are you posting your next one?" Connor asked, a stupid encouraging smile on his face. He hadn't crashed and burned. His success was modest and quiet but…it was enough. It was enough to make him want to post more. To get another _Word, dude_.

 

"I guess I should do it on a schedule. Maybe Friday?"

 

"Every Friday and Tuesday?"

 

"Something like that, I guess."

 

"I'll help you stick to it."

 

"Will you also make me a frozen pizza?"

 

"Every day if you want."

 

\--

 

The meds that Dylan was on made him feel a lot better. It wasn't artificial happiness. They just helped calm his anxiety and stabilize his happiness baseline. They helped him function.

 

They also made him constantly tired.

 

Dylan was a champion napper to begin with. Napping between classes was his favorite part of college, those little moments he got to be unconscious and let go for small portions of the day. Of course, it was easier to be grateful for a nap when you wanted it instead of when you basically had to take one.

 

In that way, Dylan’s meds made him feisty as a toddler when he got sleepy.

 

“It's someone’s bedtime,” Connor said as Dylan let out a ridiculous yawn. They were parked at the McDavid’s kitchen table, Dylan’s laptop open to job search sites while Connor poked at a crossword puzzle his mom had left half done from that morning. Mostly he was scrolling Instagram.

 

“It's one thirty,” Dylan said. “We just ate lunch. I just drank a giant iced coffee.”

 

“And yet...yawning.”

 

“It's just my drugs,” Dylan explained. He'd felt awkward talking to Connor about them at first, but Connor always took it in stride. He helped him remember to take them when he was having a particularly sleepy night, and always made sure Dylan packed them when he stayed at Connor's.

 

“Still, sleep is good for you.”

 

“Are you jonesing for a nap, McDavid?”

 

“I was thinking maybe we could take a nap in the loft? Try it out while it’s light out?”

 

Dylan didn't understand why anyone who had witnessed him and Connor in the same space at the same time questioned why he was so stupid over Connor. Connor was...he seemed like he was more than just a person. Connor was magical.

 

Dylan thought it was possible that it was his brain experiencing falling in love that was making him think that, but he stood by it.

 

Connor had already made up the bed in the loft. He’d slept there on a rare night he and Dylan had spent apart before Dylan had moved in and gushed about it to Dylan afterward. Dylan didn’t think it was because it was so amazing. He thought it was probably because he was sleeping under his own roof. 

 

Too close to the roof, in Dylan’s opinion. Still, he let Connor lead him out the front door to his tiny house. Dylan was becoming more and more comfortable in there. The more time he spent, the more comfortable he felt. They had finally gotten the flooring in, and only had a handful of finishing touches. Dylan knew how much Connor resented having to borrow money from his brother, but it was a blessing that he was able to. Not everyone had that kind of a support system, even if it did mean he’d have a loan to pay back. He and Cam had already figured out a payment plan for the money Connor borrowed. Interest-free, because Cam’s not an asshole.

 

The extra money meant that Dylan’s nights were getting closer and closer to happening on top of a trailer.

 

“It’s not as cramped when you’re laying down,” Connor said, as he pulled his jeans off. It was turning toward fall and getting chilly, but Dylan knew that he’d be warm against Connor, and too annoyed with jeans to sleep so he followed suit. “Do you want to go up first, or climb in after me?” Connor asked, his fingertips just barely touching Dylan’s wrist. It was grounding.

 

“Um, after,” Dylan said. Connor turned to climb up the ladder and slid up onto the loft.

 

Dylan looked at the ladder. He paused, the space he was about to climb into looking smaller than truly necessary. Who wants to sleep that close to their roof anyway?

 

“Baby,” Connor called down after a few long moments had passed. “We don’t have to,” he said. “We can go back inside.” 

 

“No, I’m uh, coming up,” Dylan said, climbing up to the first rung. He scaled the ladder easily, but the ladder wasn’t his issue. When he got to the top he looked over and saw Connor sprawled out on his side of the bed, easy as anything, the sight he saw before he went to bed every night. Dylan wouldn’t do this to himself, but he’d try it for Connor. If this was where Connor wanted to be, the least he could do was try. 

 

He climbed over the edge and slid up the mattress, the air chilly enough that Connor helped them quickly scramble under the covers.

 

And then it was just him and Connor. There was a window directly behind the mattress, and a skylight on his side of the bed, and Connor wrapped his arms around him when he shuffled toward him. 

 

“This okay?” he whispered into Dylan’s hair. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine them in Connor's basement bed. The sheets they were on top of now smelled exactly like Connor's detergent. He imagined the room open above him, so tall he could stand on the bed and not hit his head. He didn’t need to imagine broad, vast fields. An eight-foot ceiling was enough.

 

“I’m not freaking out yet,” Dylan said, pressing close enough to Connor to be able to hear his heart beat in his chest. It was cheesy how comforting that was. He matched his breaths to Connor's slow calm ones, and could imagine being okay. 

 

It helped that there was light streaming in through the windows. It was daytime and lovely out, the trees thinking about turning colors. Fall was Dylan’s favorite time of the year, and he couldn’t wait to smash crunchy leaves under his shoes with Connor.

 

Connor didn’t pester him any more than that. They just lay, tangled together, the way they would for any other nap. The blanket and the shared body heat kept them warm, and Dylan dropped off to sleep with the ease of someone on an SSRI that knocks them out at any hour of the day.

 

And when he woke up, Connor was still there.

 

\--

 

“This is pretty impressive,” Aaron said, standing inside Connor's tiny house. It was a week after Dylan had moved into his room with him, his stuff assimilating easily into Connor's cleaned out bedroom. They had gotten the flooring laid in one day, with the help of Cam and his meticulous measuring. They had built the little stairs up to the door, finally hung and painted the orange that Dylan had wanted. It looked amazing with the dark gray siding, the crisp white trim.

 

“I’m actually kind of impressed with myself, to be honest,” Connor said. Aaron was there to help install the countertops. They didn’t need his help strictly speaking, but he had sent Connor a text checking up on his progress, and Connor had invited him to stop by.

 

“You could sell these. Have you thought about going into business?”

 

“I don't think I have another one in me, honestly."

 

“I’m just saying. Instead of having a hardware store job, you could have your own business.”

 

“I like my hardware store job,” Connor said, bristling. Aaron had a business degree, and that’s the way he thought about everything in his life. He had a nice job and drove a nice car. Connor had grown up with Aaron. He knew that Aaron was a good guy, he just had such a specific definition of success and Connor was currently existing outside of that definition. Far outside.

 

“Yeah, but don’t you want more than that?”

 

“I have a house. I have Dylan. My mom is cool. My brother is my best friend. I live really close to a great farmer’s market. I have over a hundred subscribers on my YouTube channel. I have a lot, dude.”

 

“Okay, okay,” Aaron said, sticking his hands up in surrender. Connor was pretty sure that Aaron hired someone to decorate his condo for him. He can’t possibly know how nice it is to get text messages from the person he wants to share that space with of ideas for space saving decorating ideas. He didn’t have someone tucking paint swatches for seven different shades of white into the back pocket of his jeans and telling him that he liked ‘soft eggshell’ the best. Maybe his tiny house won’t look as hip and cool as Aaron’s condo, but that was never the point. Connor couldn’t live a life where what he had needed to be better than what everyone else had in order to be happy. He liked what he had, and he’d fight for that. “I get it dude. You’re an outlaw. You’re living by your own rules.”

 

Connor decided to stop his negative reactions, even though the way Aaron was declaring his approval was in a condescending tone. They were inside a building that Connor could pull behind his car. It wasn’t the place to have a fight.

 

“I love this paneling though,” he said, running his hands over the interior walls. They were horizontal slats, not unlike the flooring that he’d installed. It looked kind of like shiplap, and it was going to be painted soft eggshell in the coming week or two.

 

“We’re doing everything really light so that it feels bigger,” Connor said.

 

“Didn’t your boy say he was claustrophobic?”

 

“He’s working on it,” Connor said, honestly. They’d taken a nap up in the loft the day before, opening the windows so there was some air movement. Dylan had laid on his back so he could see out the skylight. He had eventually fallen asleep. Connor was pretty impressed with him.

 

“And you’re building him a tiny house to live in.”

 

“I started building it before I met Dylan.”

 

“Really? You guys are like, attached at the hip. I thought he'd been along for longer than the house.”

 

Connor shrugged, leaned against the wall of his house. “True love, I guess.”

 

“I guess so. I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

 

“You’ll meet someone.”

 

“I feel like I’m married to my job, you know?”

 

“Well, if your job makes you happy, ride that out then, I guess.”

 

“Yeah, it does make me happy.”

 

“To each his own,” Connor said. Aaron nodded, like maybe he finally understood something.

 

“Yeah. Let’s get that countertop in here,” Aaron said. It sounded like a plan to Connor.

 

There were holes already measured and cut for the sink and the small two-burner range they’d install probably next week. Dylan and Cam were in the shed when they went to grab the countertop, talking about installation strategy. Connor couldn’t stop his urge to kiss Dylan on the cheek. Dylan had picked out the countertop too, the dense black material that they used in science lab rooms in schools. It was going to look amazing.

 

“What was that for?” Dylan asked. Connor wasn’t usually mushy with him when they were building.

 

“You’ve just got such a good eye,” Connor said. “I love this countertop.” He watched the smile spread across Dylan’s face.

 

“Yeah, I think it’ll look nice, right?”

 

Cam nodded. “It’s going to look badass,” he said, and he and Aaron grabbed the small slab and hauled it into the house.

 

They were scary close to being done with construction. Connor felt like all he knew was building and planning and anticipation. He didn’t know what he was going to do once it was done.

 

Live in it, he guessed. That was the plan.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not to be mushy, but with this being the last chapter and all, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has been reading and commenting. This story is my heart in so many ways, and seeing you wonderful folks also enjoy it brings me such great joy. Anyway, thank you for the great posting experience <3

Connor didn't know that signing up to be Dylan's boyfriend was also signing up to be a babysitter sometimes.

 

Having a baby and a toddler was apparently really, really hard. He and Dylan took Sophie to the zoo one afternoon when Connor didn't have a shift and Eliza Rose had a doctor appointment. Dylan was practicing filming for his vlog and had his phone out the whole time to film.

 

Dylan had a backpack of stuff for Sophie on his back. Toys and food and water. Things to appease her when she was getting frustrated. They had a stroller that Sophie wanted to sit in when they needed her to walk and didn't want to sit in when they thought it would be a good idea.

 

She was like a cat. Connor wanted to put a leash on her.

 

"I like uncle Connor more," Sophie declared loudly when Dylan wouldn't buy her a second ice cream.

 

"Uncle Connor isn't going to buy you ice cream just because you decided he's your favorite."

 

"He isn't?" Connor asked, looking at the ice cream stand. They weren't really getting paid to look after Soph. It was the kind of babysitting you do for your family. But Ryan had given them twenty bucks to cover snacks for the three of them, and Connor had stupidly passed on ice cream the first time around.

 

Plus… _Uncle Connor_. He wasn't really into kids. Cam didn't have any yet, and his cousins' kids were mostly just terrifying to him. He couldn't imagine kids being a part of his own life. But…Uncle Connor sounded kind of nice.

 

"Uncle Connor has pretty hair," Sophie declared. Sophie also had a pile of blonde hair and the same blue eyes as Connor. It's how Megan looked as a kid. Her hair was now only generously 'dirty blonde,' her eyes more steel than ocean.

 

"Yeah," Dylan agreed, trying to bribe her into the stroller with her favorite stuffed animal. "He does have pretty hair." He’d caught that on camera, and Connor could tell from the way Dylan’s face looked in that moment that it was absolutely making it into his video for that day.

 

"Why don't you have pretty hair?" she asked, the directness of her question only capable from a child.

 

"My hair is beautiful," Dylan said. He'd gotten it cut, the wavy uncontrollable mop of it shorn into tight sides and neat on top. He'd been using Connor's hair product to mess it up a little, which he liked because it smelled like Connor. Also because Connor had been doing it for him in the mornings. Dylan was a sucker for things like that.

 

"What if I got an ice cream and gave you a lick?" Connor asked.

 

"You're terrible," Dylan said, finally getting Sophie wrangled into the stroller. It had taken them an hour to get roughly two blocks into the zoo. At this rate they could make one lap around the zoo last four or five years. Still, he looked up at Connor and smiled. Then he started pushing the stroller to the next ice cream stand. They were passing the reptile house, but Connor wasn't sad. Reptiles always creeped him out.

 

He followed after Dylan and Sophie, the head of her favorite stuffed lion peeking out the side of her stroller. She was steel-headed like Megan. Connor was terrified of what she'd be like as a teenager, but was very excited to vote for her for president of the universe, whenever she ran.

 

Connor didn't have family like this. His family did grown-up things because they were all grown-ups. When they decided on a movie to go see in theaters, it was late at night and rated R. His mom had junk food in the house, but he hadn't eaten a dinosaur chicken nugget in ten years, yet that was what was for lunch when they'd gotten to Ryan and Megan's to pick Sophie up. He liked it. He liked being needed like this. Not needed too much, mind you. Not needed at four in the morning because the under-three people in your house just don't sleep through the night. But needed for fun stuff like this.

 

He liked that Megan was texting _him_ for updates — probably because she knew that Dylan would be the one with his hands full. He sent her a photo of Dylan pushing the stroller, backpack heavy on his back, lion head bobbing in Sophie's grip. He thought about if he and Dylan had day jobs. They wouldn't be here. They would be in overcooled offices, dreaming of how they would spend their time after they got out of work.

 

Yeah. He was really, really broke. He lived in his mom’s basement. He had toddler spit on his shirt. But he'd never been happier, never felt more part of his own family, never felt this much a part of someone else's family. He needed to believe that this was worth it.

 

\--

 

“I wanna go camping,” Connor said. He and Dylan were laying on their backs in the backyard, the air cool enough to necessitate hoodies. They were close enough to touch shoulders, Dylan warm against him. 

 

“Alright, I guess. Weekend trip?” Dylan said, flipping on his side to rest his cheek on Connor's chest. There were beer bottles in the grass next to them. There was paint drying on the walls inside the tiny house, and they both needed a break from Connor's basement. Dylan still felt a little weird being pretty much anywhere in the McDavid house. Connor was trying to be sensitive to that, even if it meant laying in the yard together.

 

“I was thinking for like, maybe a couple months,” Connor said. “Tiny house is almost done. Thought we could take it up to the woods for a while. Get a campground site.” 

 

“And do what?” 

 

“Ice skate,” Connor said. He had a vision, just the two of them in the vastness of nature. He could learn how to play the guitar. He could catch up on reading. He could be right up in Dylan’s space. The only place he really wanted to be.

 

“What about getting jobs?”

 

“You have all the time in the world to get a job,” Connor argued. He had talked to Wayne about the idea of taking some time off. He didn’t have a lot of money, but the winter was slow at Wayne’s. It would almost be a favor to take a couple months off.

 

“Babe, I can’t just not have a job. The point of not taking another temp position is to take the time to find a job I want.” 

 

“But think of the soul searching you could do in the woods.” 

 

“We’d just run through the world’s supply of condoms.” 

 

“Sounds like soul searching to me.” 

 

“Connor. Listen to me. I want to get a job. I don’t want to go frolicking into the woods. I want some like, financial security. I want my bank account to go up sometimes, and not just down. I want something to do with my days.” 

 

“Your job made you so miserable,” Connor said. Dylan didn’t want that job. Connor thought the idea of taking some real time off would be appealing to him.

 

“Yeah, but I had somewhere to go every day. I saw human beings that weren’t named McDavid. They paid me. There were benefits. I didn’t like my job, but I liked having a job. Having a job is important to me. I don’t like the feeling of barely scraping by. I don’t like the feeling of free falling.”

 

“I’m not free falling,” Connor said, pushing up onto his elbows and dislodging Dylan from where he was curled against him. He and Dylan argued a little. Everyone did. But they didn’t really fight. There had never been a reason to. But Connor felt like Dylan was very close to stepping on his toes. And Connor thought maybe he’d already stepped on Dylan’s.

 

“No, you’re not because you have Wayne’s, and you have your mom’s house as a safety net. I don’t have those things.”

 

“You have our house,” Connor said. It was the first time he’d said it out loud like that. _Our house_. It was the way he thought about it in his head. He was building a home with Dylan. It was Dylan’s orange door, and Dylan’s decorating ideas, and Dylan’s elbow grease in there.

 

“It’s not my house, Connor. I’m afraid I won’t be able to even stay in there with you. It’s your house, and your dream, but living on wheels is not what I want.”

 

“I’m building a house you don’t even want?”

 

“When would that have ever mattered?” Dylan asked, voice straining in his throat. Connor had never heard him sound like that.

 

“Because I want to be with you.”

 

“Then maybe the last six months of me barely being able to be inside of it would have been a good clue as to how I felt about it.”

 

“I thought things were getting better.”

 

“Things are getting better, but that doesn’t mean that my dream is to live in a house that gives me panic attacks. I want to be able to sit up in bed at night without hitting my head. I want to be able to have sex without referring to the blueprints first and seeing if we need to climb down a ladder to execute whatever we’re in the mood for. I want cupboard space. I want to own things.”

 

“I can’t stop building it,” Connor said, his voice small. The thing about passion was that it was consuming. All consuming. The tiny house project had put blinders on him, even when he thought he was seeing things so clearly. Dylan was helping him build his house. He wasn’t helping him build _their_ house. Connor was surprised at how much it hurt to realize that. How much his excitement about it included Dylan.

 

He didn’t understand how much Dylan was dreading it.

 

“I don’t know what to do,” Connor whispered.

 

Dylan pulled him up to his feet by his hand. “I’m cold. I want to go inside and make popcorn and watch a movie.”

 

“And then what?” Connor asked, picking up the empties that surrounded them.

 

“Cuddle in bed.”

 

“And then?”

 

“I don’t know, babe,” Dylan said, and Connor could hear how sad and flat his voice was. He felt like he had fucked up big time, but he didn’t know how to undo his mistake. He still wanted his tiny house. He still loved it. But he couldn’t live somewhere without Dylan. Nothing was a solution if it didn’t include Dylan.

 

\--

 

Dylan decided to go stay with his brother for a little while the day Connor finished his house. They were sitting in the grass out back, Dylan and Connor, Cam and Aaron, and Kelly. They split a six-pack, the nice kind that Cam bought, not the shitty budget stuff he and Connor had been buying.

 

The beer was crisp and cool, a breeze blowing through the grass where it was getting tall. The house was beautiful, and Connor was thinking of getting a professional to take some nice photos of it before he actually “messed it up by living in it.”

 

“We could sleep with the windows open tonight,” Connor said, slumping against Dylan’s shoulder and nuzzling into his neck. It was late afternoon, the sky getting dark and chilly around them.

 

“Oh, sleep. Tonight.” Dylan hadn't thought about how now that it was done it would be their house. It would be Connor's house. “I was uh, actually thinking about going to stay with Ryan and Megan for a little while.” He hadn't been thinking about it. He'd been thinking about sharing Connor's basement queen-sized bed for the indefinite future. Actually living in the house wasn't real enough for him to have had a backup plan.

 

“Oh.” Connor's tone was flat. There was a conversation surrounding them, the others lost in their own topic. They were all used to the way Dylan and Connor could turn into an island anywhere, around anyone. “If we um, stayed in the basement tonight would you stay here?”

 

That was the offer Dylan didn't know he was waiting for, the thing he wanted. But he was stupid and stubborn, and “tonight” wasn't enough for him. He had put a lot of effort into being able to be in Connor's tiny house and he still just didn't like it. It didn't make him panic anymore, but it also wasn't someplace he was eager to call home. He still could barely breathe.

 

“I already talked to Ryan and Megan about it…” Dylan said, even though he hadn’t. His reason was thin and stupid and it hung between them, the first film of separation they had really ever experienced. It felt thick between them.

 

\--

 

Dylan had an overnight duffel on his shoulder. He felt landless, like a ship with no port as Ryan lead him up to the nursery. There was an air mattress already blown up in the corner, the room a pale pink and crisp white cupcake. It was a baby girl’s room. Dylan didn't belong here either.

 

“You know,” Ryan said, following him into the room and closing the door after him. There was a white rocking chair in the corner of the room, and Ryan took a seat on it, his Dad Face on. “The nightly charge at this little inn is a brother-to-brother talk about your love life.”

 

“It's fine,” Dylan said, words clipped.

 

“Then why aren't you staying with your boy? A month ago you were attached at the hip.”

 

“He just, you know, finished his house.”

 

“Oooooh,” Ryan said, drawing out his vowel. “Megan was asking about that. How you’d live in a tiny house.”

 

“That is a great question,” Dylan said, finally dropping his bag and sinking down to sit on the air bed. “I have no idea. We’ve taken naps in it since it was done enough to do that, and I can handle that. I've worked up to being able to be in there and do work in there. But I can't imagine actually living in there. We always went back to the McDavid’s basement after we were done for the day. We had the big screen and the sectional, and a bed in a real room. And I wasn't a huge fan of the fact that it was his mom’s house, but I mean, it was better than living in a shoebox, even if it's Connor's shoebox.”

 

“So you came to stay in my baby cry factory.”

 

“Sound isn't bad like small spaces.”

 

“Does Connor know this is the issue?”

 

“I mean, I'm pretty sure, yeah.”

 

“But you haven't talked about it?”

 

“...not in so many words. I think he thinks my main problem is the sleeping loft, not the like, situation of living there.”

 

“Sounds like you should talk to him.”

 

Dylan flopped on his back, the air mattress shifting below him. “If I talk to him right now, I'll probably cry.”

 

“Then take a day to cool off,” Ryan suggested. “I'm going to go make dinner. Hope you like mac and cheese and dinosaur chicken nuggets.”

 

\--

 

 

“He didn't break up with you,” Cam said, shoulder almost touching Connor's as they sat on the couch in the basement. Cam was moving to New York in a week and had really pushed to help Connor finish the house before he left. Cam’s dog could tell how sad he was, and she was snuggled into him dutifully. Maybe he should get a dog.

 

“Feels like it,” Connor pouted. Connor was pretty used to Dylan being the easy constant in his life. He didn't like the conflict. He wanted things to be good without having to put too much work into it.

 

“That kid has the grossest heart eyes for you, baby bro.”

 

“I can't figure it out sometimes. I mean...he met me via my _tiny house_ building YouTube channel.”

 

“Not because he was searching for tiny houses,” Cam said. It was fair. HGTV was on the screen in front of them. Connor was itching to build something new already. He had grown up with this myth that McDavids weren't handy fix-it folks. But that wasn't true. Maybe his parents weren't, but that didn't mean anything about him. He had been doodling plans for an A-Frame house he wanted to build. Not a tiny house, but a small one. Maybe one with a shed roof. His gabled roof was fine, but it wasn't pretty. It wasn't interesting. He wanted a clearstory and a real bedroom, and he was man enough to admit that it was because of Dylan.

 

“Is it dumb that I'm less excited about the house now that it's done?”

 

“It took you seven months. There was a lot of anticipation there. It's not dumb.”

 

“I don't even really like it. I mean, I like it as a place I could live, but I'm currently resentful of the fact that it is officially a wedge in my relationship.”

 

“Dyl has never seemed like the kind of guy who wants an adventure. The open road and the wild forests and making your way as you go.”

 

“No, that's not Dylan at all.”

 

“Have you thought about — and please don't kill me for suggesting this — trying to find someone who shares your life goals?”

 

“I love Dylan more than I thought was even humanly possible. Like, you know that scene in The Grinch where his heart grows three sizes? That's how it felt when I fell for Dyls.”

 

“Okay, well, first of all, gross. Second of all, if you're not willing to compromise your boy, you need to compromise _for_ you boy.”

 

“Every penny I have ever had, and many of my future pennies, exist as a livable trailer.”

 

“So….sell it.”

 

The suggestion of it pulled at his heart, made his chest feel tight and his brain feel dislodged. It felt like getting a puppy and working hard through the potty training and the chewing just to give it up for someone else to have a well-trained dog.

 

“I'm not selling it,” Connor said.

 

\--

 

Connor wore his heart on his sleeve. He was never very good at hiding his feelings, and when his feelings were about Dylan, it was even more apparent. 

 

“Where’s your boy?” Aaron asked, as he and Connor hung out in the tiny house, finished and beautiful and awful.

 

“He’s helping his brother with his newborn.” 

 

“Oh, does he have baby fever? No way a baby would fit in this thing,” Aaron said, thumping a fist against the kitchen counter. Aaron kept opening cabinets and peeking into things. Connor didn’t really have anything of his moved in yet, but it still felt a little invasive.

 

“Dyl doesn’t want kids. He’s just a good brother.” 

 

“But you miss him. That’s why you’re making that mopey face? Or is it because your project is over and you’re depressed about it?” 

 

“Little of column A, little of column B, I guess.” 

 

“You finished and he ran away?” 

 

“Shut up, Aaron,” Connor said, knocking his shoulder into Aaron’s. He hit the nail on the head though, too close for Connor's comfort.

 

“I mean, what claustrophobe would even want to live in this thing?” 

 

“Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about.” Connor sat down on the bench that he would eventually upholster into a couch.

 

“Maybe it’ll just take time,” Aaron said. Connor could tell he had no idea what to say to that. He didn’t blame him. “The more I look at this thing, the more amazing I think it is.” 

 

“What thing, my house?” 

 

Aaron rolled his eyes. “Yeah, asshole. Your house. I’ve been thinking about it. I want one.” 

 

“I can email you the blueprints for it.”

 

“I was thinking that maybe I could commission you to make one for me.” 

 

“I can't do it again, man,” Connor said honestly. He’d had enough energy to finish this one, but only barely. He couldn’t imagine building another one. The time and effort that he put into it were worth it because it was his. Because he thought he was building a house for himself, a dream that morphed into thinking he was building a house for him and Dylan. “But speaking of my claustrophobe love...do you want to buy this one?” 

 

“This one? Dude, you put your blood, sweat, and tears into this one. You built this one for you.” 

 

“I feel like selling it and having the pressure of living in it off the table might help my relationship.” 

 

“You’re that into Dylan?”

 

"I’m crazy into him. He’s my end-all-be-all. This,” he gestured around himself. “This is just a house, you know?” 

 

“You’d really sell it to me?” 

 

“I don’t really get why you want it, but sure dude. I’d rather sell it to someone I know than to a stranger on the internet.” 

 

“You’ve had pretty good luck with strangers on the internet, from what I can tell.” 

 

“This is true. Still.” 

 

“Yeah, man. I get it.”

 

They shook on the idea of it, and Aaron went home to figure out how much he could spend on it, what fair market value for it would be. Connor walked him to his car, but then meandered back to his house. He hadn’t even taken it on a maiden voyage anywhere. He’d only spent a couple nights in it. 

 

He stayed in there for a while, running his hand over the interior walls, over the propane heater and the fold up table. Connor knew what the feeling that was flooding his body was. It was the feeling of falling out of love. Of looking at something that you were once crazy for, and feeling nothing remaining for it. Connor knew he had kind of a “one-track mind,” as his mother always called it. Laser focus on the thing he wanted until he got it, or lost interest. He knew the feeling. He was the feeling. It was all consuming, eclipsing, suffocating. Sometimes that feeling felt like it would swallow him whole. Then sometimes it would fade, and sometimes it would shut off like a flipped switch. Either way, it left him searching for the next obsession.

 

Dylan had always felt different than that. Dylan wasn’t the fire that he felt when he had the idea for a new project. Dylan was a relaxing hot bath. Dylan was his favorite meal on his birthday. Dylan was a long car ride on the open road, the comfort of driving a car you knew as well as you knew yourself. Connor was sure his love for Dylan wouldn’t fade like this. Dylan couldn’t fade. There was nothing to fade. He was a constant. Connor felt like he’d felt like this forever, like his soul was just waiting for Dylan to come along.

 

He pulled the orange door shut behind him and locked it. Selling his house wasn’t a hard decision. Choosing Dylan would never be a hard decision for him.

 

\--

 

Dylan showed back up at the McDavid’s house two days later after being talked into hanging out in their usual spot in Connor's basement. He was hesitant. Life at his brother’s house was totally chaotic, but he at least felt like he belonged there. He was useful there, distracting Sophie so Megan could feed the baby in peace, or looking after both girls so she could get some sleep.

 

He showed back up at the McDavid house feeling more distant than ever. He and Connor had talked and texted, alternating between pretending like nothing was wrong and having late night FaceTime calls where Dylan had to whisper and Connor whispered back, because you can't use your regular volume voice in a whisper conversation.

 

Connor must have been waiting at the door for him.

 

“Baby,” he whispered before pulling Dylan inside, and wrapping him in a hug immediately. As weird as Dylan felt about the tiny house and his and Connor's conflicting desires, having Connor in his arms made him feel complete again. Dylan barely noticed when their hug turned into kissing. Only that it was desperate and necessary. There was something hovering between them still, a film that kept them separate from each other. Dylan tried to kiss his way through it, his hands finding Connor's lower back as Connor wound his arms around Dylan’s neck.

 

When they eventually were kiss satisfied, Dylan pulled back to get a good look at Connor. Connor had his face in his hands, thumbs smoothing over his cheeks. Dylan hadn't realized how tense he was until he relaxed.

 

“Is this your carefully researched seduction outfit?” Dylan asked, his voice low so it didn't carry to any other part of the house. Connor blushed. He was wearing loose sweatpants, at least two sizes too big for him, and a red Team Canada shirt that Dylan knew said Crosby on the back of it. His bare toes were sticking out the bottom of the sweats where they were pooled on the hardwood. His hair was soft and free of product, golden bangs hanging down over his forehead. Dylan wanted to slip his hands down the back of Connor's sweats, to pull him closer. The constant threat of Connor's mom being somewhere in the house stopped him. He settled for letting his fingers explore up the back of Connor's t-shirt, the cotton soft from wear. His skin was soft and taut and warm, and Dylan was about four seconds away from telling Connor that he was moving into that tiny house with him forever.

 

“Oh, hi sweetheart,” Connor's mom called from the kitchen, catching sight of them. “We’ve missed you around here.”

 

“Hi Kelly,” Dylan said, blushing a little. He dropped his hands from Connor's back, but Connor cuddled into him under his arm, and Dylan couldn't help but tug him closer, arm across his shoulders.

 

“Well, Connor ordered you guys some pizzas. I’m going out to dinner with my book club, which means that I’ll be out late.” 

 

“Sounds good, Mom,” Connor said, and pulled Dylan downstairs. 

 

The basement was several degrees colder than the rest of the house, and Dylan was glad for his hoodie. The TV was already turned on to the Leafs game, pregame bullshit playing in the background. The game didn’t matter. It was just a preseason game. Connor, in one smooth move, stretched out on his back on the couch and pulled Dylan down on top of him.

 

“Hi,” Connor said as Dylan got situated on his forearms, shivering as Connor's cold fingers walked up the back of his t-shirt. “I missed you.”

 

“It’s been two days,” Dylan said. He had been saying the same thing to himself incessantly.

 

Connor raised an eyebrow at him.

 

“I missed you too, babe,” he said, leaning down to nip at Connor's lips before he pressed forward the final millimeters. Kissing Connor always felt like coming home to him. It was familiar and soft. Connor tasted right, like his. He was used to making out with Connor on this couch, Connor solid under him, the callouses he’d developed on his hands from building rough and amazing.

 

He was nibbling at Connor's jaw when Kelly called down that the pizzas had arrived.

 

“Shit,” Connor said, stuffing his hand down his sweats to try to adjust his boner. He was wearing sweats. It wasn’t very adjustable. “Can you go get them?” His face was sweet and pleading, but Dylan would have done it no matter how nicely Connor asked. Dylan would have delivered these pizzas to Connor across a frozen tundra on a dog sled. He stood up off the couch and adjusted his own situation in his jeans. 

 

“Good?” Dylan asked. Connor's eyes dropped down.

 

“Yeah, good.” 

 

Dylan headed upstairs. He had his wallet in his back pocket, and was ready to hand over however much was due to the delivery person, but Kelly called to him again from the kitchen.

 

“They’re in here, honey. I took care of that for you. Put your money away.” 

 

The pizzas were in a stack on the kitchen table with two plates, some silverware, and a pile of napkins. 

 

“Thanks so much, Mrs. McDavid.” 

 

“You know,” she said, dropping her voice low. “Connor has been the mopiest kid the past couple days. Did you two fight? Connor doesn’t tell me anything.” 

 

“No fight. Just thought I should go help my brother out with his newborn.” 

 

“That’s very sweet of you, honey. You know, you’re welcome here always. Even if Connor decides he wants to sleep outside in his trailer, you’re still welcome to stay here in the house like a sane person.” 

 

“Thanks, Kelly,” Dylan said, laughing a little.

 

“I think one of the best things about Connor is that he gets an idea and he executes it. There’s no halfway with that kid. If he wants something, he makes it happen. If he doesn’t want something, he can barely make himself care.” 

 

“Yeah, I’ve noticed the same thing about him.” 

 

“I’m just saying, before you came along, it was all about that tiny house. In the two days you’ve been out in Mississauga, he hasn’t been inside that house once. Spent his life savings on it, and instead he’s sitting at my kitchen table talking incessantly about how much he misses you, in so many words.” 

 

Dylan blushed. “Really?” 

 

“I know that the tiny house is a crazy idea, and I know it’s barely enough space for one person let alone two. But I’m pretty sure Connor would be willing to do whatever it takes to have you come back here, sweetie. Including sleeping inside,” she said, with a sly smile. 

 

“Yeah. I mean, I’ll be back soon,” Dylan said, finally feeling like maybe coming back to the McDavid house wouldn’t be the definition of shame.

 

Kelly handed off the pizzas and Dylan brought them back down the basement. 

 

“That took a while,” Connor said. 

 

“I talked to your mom a little,” Dylan said, setting the pizzas on the coffee table and sitting close enough to Connor that he could toss his legs in his lap.

 

“What did she say?” Connor asked, a suspicious eyebrow quirking up.

 

“Just that you’ve been missing me like crazy,” Dylan said, teasing a little. 

 

“Well, did I not make that clear already?” Connor asked, nosing up under Dylan’s neck and kissing at the hinge of his jaw. 

 

It devolved into makeout session part two, the pizzas cooling on the table, forgotten. Dylan never forgot how good it felt to have Connor's body pressed against his, but the difference between memory and real life was two worlds. It was in moments like these, intimate quiet moments, where Dylan felt like they could merge into one being at any moment, the nature of their separate bodies just a tenuous idea that could be so easily replaced with the idea of them sharing one combined space. He loved the moment when he could feel Connor's lips get kiss soft, when their mouths felt like they could melt together. 

 

When Connor finally pulled away from the kiss, he was panting a little.

 

“I sold my house,” he said, worry and fear a deep groove in between his eyes.

 

“You what?” Dylan said, pushing up on his elbows. He must have heard him wrong. “You did what?” 

 

“I sold my house.” 

 

“To who? Why?” 

 

“To whom-”

 

“Connor McDavid, what the fuck are you talking about?” 

 

“Aaron asked me to build him one, you know, like he’d commission me to build one ‘just like mine.’ And I was thinking about how much you hate that house, and how much I don’t want to live somewhere you don’t want to live, and how everything would just be easier if it was a pile of money instead of a burden.” 

 

“Baby,” Dylan said. “You didn’t have to do that. You shouldn't have done that for me.”

 

“I did it for me,” Connor said, shifting so he could put a hand over Dylan's heart. Connor was only mushy with him in private, but when he was feeling that way he usually went all out. “I want to be with you. You’re more important than a trailer with plumbing.”

 

“You spent your life savings on that.”

 

“And I got back double for it.”

 

“You what?”

 

“Aaron researched like, market value on it and gave me double what I invested. I have more money right now than I ever have. I've already paid Cam back.”

 

“But we built that house together.”

 

“And you won't sleep in it.”

 

Now Dylan was hesitant. Yeah, that was true. He hadn't come out and said it but he very much had skipped out on moving into the tiny house when it was done because the idea made his throat tight. “I would have-”

 

“No, you wouldn't, and that's okay.”

 

“Connor, you can't go making these huge decisions just because of me.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Is this moving too fast? Are we moving too fast?”

 

“It's been eight months. I'm in love with you. Some people are already married by this time in their relationships.”

 

“I'm worried that you made such a rash decision just because of me.”

 

“Dyl, it's just a house. You're the love of my life. Guess what’s more important to me?”

 

 _The love of my life_. That felt momentous. Dylan felt it like the fire of a thousand suns, hot and powerful and terrifying.

 

“You're kinda freaking me out,” Dylan said, feeling anxiety spark through his body. It wasn't all bad anxiety, but he couldn't control the chemical reactions happening in his body that made him want to run away.

 

Connor's face sank into a deeper worry, and he detangled himself from Dylan and sat at the edge of the couch. “Dyl, I know you want stability and a house on wheels isn't stability for you. This is a relationship. We can compromise.”

 

Dylan was taking deep breaths. He scooted so his back was against the armrest, upright. “Is this- you're committed to this?”

 

“I asked you to move in with me. I chose you over a really big craft project. You’re it for me.” Connor was good at many things, and one of them was being sincere. Dylan could see it in his eyes, the force behind his words. He believed him.

 

“A really big craft project?” Dylan asked.

 

“Yeah. Helped me learn that I like to build stuff and that I'm okay at it. My dad’s whole identity was that he didn't do DIY stuff. I spent my childhood hearing ‘McDavids don't fix things.’ But that wasn't true. My dad didn't fix things, but I like to. And this project helped me learn that. Maybe I wouldn't have sold it if I didn't see a future full of projects, but I do. It was my starter project, and I just feel fortunate to have made a good buck off of it. It turned out great. I liked working on it with you.”

 

Connor had his hand high on Dylan's thigh, and Dylan could hardly think, could hardly process the words that Connor was saying.

 

“I can't believe you sold your house.”

 

“I can't believe I met my boyfriend on the Internet. Life is full of the unbelievable.”

 

“I don't like it,” Dylan said. He would have liked order to his life events. Still, he tugged at Connor until he was curled on top of him again. Dylan was hungry, but he was sure the pizza was cold already. The game was already on the second period.

 

“You should stay,” Connor said, after watching the game for a while.

 

“I'll come back. Maybe tomorrow.” Dylan was still scared. He'd never had feelings like this- feelings that eclipsed anything he'd ever felt before.

 

“I mean, you should stay tonight.”

 

Dylan finally had one hand slipped down the back of Connor's sweats, just resting on his ass. It was comfortable and nice, and Dylan favored the weight of Connor against him. Still… “I don't have my meds.”

 

"We could go get them in the morning. It’ll be Saturday, I don't have a shift.”

 

“I need them tonight or I'll get the headache to end all headaches.”

 

“We could go pick them up tonight.”

 

“That's a forty minute drive both ways.”

 

“If we go together that's an hour and twenty minutes of silly jokes and red light kisses.”

 

“Let's just eat the pizza, sweetheart. I'll go back to my brother's house, take my meds, go to sleep, and pack up and come back tomorrow.”

 

“Tomorrow is so far away.” Dylan was a sucker for Connor's pouts. Tonight though, he kissed him on the nose and pushed his bangs back away from his forehead.

 

“It's like, two hours away. We’ll survive.”

 

\--

 

Connor was not used to being flush with cash. His bank account was displaying numbers heretofore unheard of. It wasn't an actual huge pile of cash- in fact, Connor was pretty sure that Cam had more money in his accounts than Connor did now when he was like, twenty-two.

 

Still, the number was impressive to him, and glowed with possibility.

 

He had put his final video up on YouTube, a goodbye to his house that he'd almost cried when he had filmed that was getting an outpouring of viewer reactions. Mostly that people couldn't believe that he’d done it.

 

He kept replying with almost the exact same response over and over: the adventure didn't end with the sale of the tiny house. The adventure began. He had new projects in mind for the future, and the chunk of change in his bank account would at least start his goals.

 

He had woken up curled into Dylan that morning, the ceiling of his childhood home comfortably high above them. His room was looking more and more like Dylan actually lived there. His laundry basket was in the corner, his laptop was on Connor's desk, charging. His head was on Connor's pillow, hair messy and beautiful. They had needed the Define the Relationship Conversation they had had after Connor had sold his house. It broke through the membrane of distance between them, made the thing that made their relationship feel stilted dissolve.

 

Connor nudged Dylan awake, watched as his eyes flickered before they opened, big and brown. They were dark in the late morning light, the sun slanting in through Connor's window.

 

“Morning,” Dylan rasped, snuggling in closer. They usually drifted apart in the night. Connor liked those first morning moments where they found each other again.

 

“Mmmm,” Connor hummed in response, letting Dylan settle into the curve of his body. “I like that you can sleep late now,” Connor said, “at least for a little while.” Dylan had interviews the following week. A few of them, actually. Connor wanted to imagine that they would be able to live his vagabond dream of traveling around and doing whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, the pressures of student loans and rent far away from them. But that life would have made Dylan crazy. Dylan wanted roots.

 

“Couple more weeks I hope. I like this part of the day.” It usually took them a few hours to finally make it out of bed. Connor would miss this when Dylan had to start waking up for the nine-to-five he wanted.

 

“Me too. Hey, I was thinking-”

 

“Uhuo,” Dylan said, his voice teasing. 

 

“Yeah, yeah. You’ve been hanging out with my mom too much lately. I was thinking that we should buy a house with the money I got from Aaron.” 

 

“A tiny house?” 

 

“A small house. One that’s big enough for your stuff. One that’s attached to a piece of land, with a permanent address. Real plumbing. You know. That kind of house.”

 

“Oh,” Dylan said, eyes blinking open completely now. Connor could tell he had Dylan’s attention. “We would end up with a mortgage then,” Dylan said.

 

“We could get a cheap one. A fixer. Maybe something small we could buy outright, fix up as we save enough money to.” 

 

“I...actually really like that idea,” Dylan said. “We could still paint it gray, have an orange door.” 

 

Connor kissed his forehead. “Yeah babe, we could. We could make it together.” 

 

“We could get a dog,” Dylan said, getting a little animated.

 

“I suppose that’s an option.”

 

“We could put up a fence, and have raised gardens for vegetables.” 

 

“We could have a garage, maybe,” Connor said. He’d rather have a house he could buy outright, cash, than a house with a garage. They could build a garage later. Connor knew how to build walls, a gabled roof.

 

“I like this idea,” Dylan said, pushing Connor onto his back, taking the idea of getting up out of his mind.

 

The house was quiet, or at least the basement was, and Connor finally let himself dream a new dream. One where he and Dylan had their own house. One that was quiet and small and permanent. Probably one that had been foreclosed on and needed a lot of work. But one they could make their collective dream, together.

 

\-- EPILOGUE

 

Dylan chose the photo of the two of them in front of their house, holding the SOLD sign their relator had shoved into their hands before hitting the shutter button on her phone as the header for their channel. It took them four months to find the house of their dreams. It was a one bedroom, one bath 600 square foot turn-of-the-century darling that had been bank owned and needed some serious love. 

 

It fit their qualifications though. It was livable now. The kitchen hadn’t been touched since the seventies and had avocado and mustard tiles on the floor. There was dark paneling in one of the rooms. Their bedroom and bathroom (also known as the entire upper level) was cold because they needed to re-insulate, and like Dylan had fully expected, the garage left a little to be desired, just one car that Connor had already filled with tools.

 

The first few videos Dylan had posted to their channel was of their house hunting adventures. Connor had made a teaser video for their new channel to post on his Tiny House project’s page, and his viewers came by the tens to watch their newest adventure. Dylan’s viewers came too, from the channel he kept posting to, that he loved posting to. He hadn't anticipated enjoying vlogging so much, but it was such a good community for him.

 

It was a modest audience for their new channel, but Dylan thought that with him properly in charge, and the video making and editing being removed from Connor and his cell phone, Dylan could have their viewership climb.

 

They moved into their house with hand-me-down furniture and Craigslist finds. Cam came up from New York to help build a beautiful hardwood dining room table, like the ones Connor had been coveting on every HGTV show they’d been watching in the past year of their lives. One better than the one that had been commissioned from him.

 

Their goals were planned out and tacked up to a corkboard in their living room. Renovate the kitchen, re-insulate the upstairs, build a two car garage and a shed, restore the hardwood on the main floor, finish the basement, paint the exterior, replace the windows. There were budgets and goals for each project, and Dylan had tacked up ideas from design magazines by each as well.

 

Their house was a mess around him. He was still adjusting to the new job he’d found just a few months ago — tech support for a small software company in the city. He was respected there, treated like a person. He loved it. He was sitting on the couch that used to be in the McDavid’s living room (Kelly said that Connor moving out was a great excuse to redecorate) half surrounded by still unpacked boxes, Connor completely asleep next to him. His promotion to assistant manager at Wayne’s meant longer hours, but it also meant more money. It meant more responsibility too. Dylan loved seeing Connor responsible for things. He always took such pride in his work. 

 

 _Con and Dyl Reno their House_ was a dumb channel title, but it was the only one they could agree on. They already had two hundred and thirty-four subscribers.

 

The first night they slept in their new house, Connor had spooned up behind Dylan in the same bed they’d spent so many nights in before, the ceiling sitting high and comfortable above them, and whispered his dreams into Dylan's ear. A puppy, a garden, a new kitchen. Dirt everywhere, crooked DIY tiles in the bathroom. The two of them together with their tiny mortgage and the roof over their heads.

 

Dylan said he thought that sounded pretty nice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm thewestishharpooners on tumblr <3

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, and thanks if you stick around for the whole thing! <3


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